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The dataset generation failed
Error code: DatasetGenerationError
Exception: TypeError
Message: Couldn't cast array of type string to null
Traceback: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1870, in _prepare_split_single
writer.write_table(table)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/arrow_writer.py", line 622, in write_table
pa_table = table_cast(pa_table, self._schema)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 2292, in table_cast
return cast_table_to_schema(table, schema)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 2245, in cast_table_to_schema
arrays = [
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 2246, in <listcomp>
cast_array_to_feature(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 1795, in wrapper
return pa.chunked_array([func(chunk, *args, **kwargs) for chunk in array.chunks])
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 1795, in <listcomp>
return pa.chunked_array([func(chunk, *args, **kwargs) for chunk in array.chunks])
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 2065, in cast_array_to_feature
casted_array_values = _c(array.values, feature.feature)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 1797, in wrapper
return func(array, *args, **kwargs)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 2102, in cast_array_to_feature
return array_cast(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 1797, in wrapper
return func(array, *args, **kwargs)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/table.py", line 1948, in array_cast
raise TypeError(f"Couldn't cast array of type {_short_str(array.type)} to {_short_str(pa_type)}")
TypeError: Couldn't cast array of type string to null
The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/src/services/worker/src/worker/job_runners/config/parquet_and_info.py", line 1438, in compute_config_parquet_and_info_response
parquet_operations = convert_to_parquet(builder)
File "/src/services/worker/src/worker/job_runners/config/parquet_and_info.py", line 1050, in convert_to_parquet
builder.download_and_prepare(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 924, in download_and_prepare
self._download_and_prepare(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1000, in _download_and_prepare
self._prepare_split(split_generator, **prepare_split_kwargs)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1741, in _prepare_split
for job_id, done, content in self._prepare_split_single(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1897, in _prepare_split_single
raise DatasetGenerationError("An error occurred while generating the dataset") from e
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book_title
string | author
string | genres
sequence | tags
sequence | chapter_title
string | text
string |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | The Eurostar | You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy—being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.
Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.
Of course, it's much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where's the book in that? Better the boastful charade of pretending to be an adventurer:
Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness,
in a lusty "Look-at-me!" in exotic landscapes.
This was more or less my mood as I was packing to leave home. I also thought: But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, "An aimless joy is a pure joy."
And there are dreams: one, the dream of a foreign land that I enjoy at home, staring east into space at imagined temples, crowded bazaars, and what V. S. Pritchett called "human architecture," lovely women in gauzy clothes, old trains clattering on mountainsides, the mirage of happiness; two, the dream state of travel itself. Often on a trip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly colored unreality of foreignness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don't belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you're strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.
Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisible—the usual condition of the older traveler—is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveler isn't in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel's slow tempo.
Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness—traveling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your traveling life and not feel like a specter. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the ghost train. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 2 | Long after I took the trip I wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar I went on thinking how I'd gone overland, changing trains across Asia, improvising my trip, rubbing against the world. And reflecting on what I'd seen—the way the unrevisited past is always looping in your dreams. Memory is a ghost train too. Ages later, you still ponder the beautiful face you once glimpsed in a distant country. Or the sight of a noble tree, or a country road, or a happy table in a café, or some angry boys armed with rusty spears shrieking, "Run you life, dim-dim!"—or the sound of a train at night, striking that precise musical note of train whistles, a diminished third, into the darkness, as you lie in the train, moving through the world as travelers do, "inside the whale."
Thirty-three years went by. I was then twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains, most of them pulled by steam locomotives, boiling across the hinterland of Turkey and India. I loved the symmetry in the time difference. Time passing had become something serious to me, embodied in the process of my growing old. As a young man I regarded the earth as a fixed and trustworthy thing that would see me into my old age; but older, I began to understand transformation as a natural law, something emotional in an undependable world that was visibly spoiled. It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth, the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.
"Without change there can be no nostalgia," a friend once said to me, and I realized that what I began to witness was not just change and decay, but imminent extinction. Had my long-ago itinerary changed as much as me? I had the idea of taking the same trip again, traveling in my own footsteps—a serious enterprise, but the sort of trip that younger, opportunistic punks often take to make a book and get famous.*
*The list is very long and includes travelers' books in the footsteps of Graham Greene, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Leonard Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Mr. Kurtz, H. M. Stanley, Leopold Bloom, Saint Paul, Basho, Jesus, and Buddha.
The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life. Travel also holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home. In a distant place no one knows you—nearly always a plus. And you can pretend, in travel, to be different from the person you are, unattached, enigmatic, younger, richer or poorer, anyone you choose to be, the rebirth that many travelers experience if they go far enough.
The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible, not as a search for lost time but for the grotesquerie of what happened since. In most cases it is like meeting an old lover years later and hardly recognizing the object of desire in this pinched and bruised old fruit. We all live with fantasies of transformation. Live long enough and you see them enacted—the young made old, the road improved, houses where there were once fields; and their opposites, a good school turned into a ruin, a river poisoned, a pond shrunk and filled with trash, and dismal reports: "He's dead," "She's huge," "She committed suicide," "He's now prime minister," "He's in jail," "You can't go there anymore."
A great satisfaction in growing old—one of many—is assuming the role of a witness to the wobbling of the world and seeing irreversible changes. The downside, besides the tedium of listening to the delusions of the young, is hearing the same hackneyed opinions over and over, not just those of callow youth but, much worse and seemingly criminal, the opinions of even callower people who ought to know better, all the lies about war and fear and progress and the enemy—the world as a wheel of repetition. They—I should say "we"—are bored by things we've heard a million times before, books we've dismissed, the discoveries that are not new, the proposed solutions that will solve nothing. "I can tell that I am growing old," says the narrator in Borges's story "The Congress." "One unmistakable sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it—it's little more than timid variations on what's already been."
Older people are perceived as cynics and misanthropes—but no, they are simply people who have at last heard the still, sad music of humanity played by an inferior rock band howling for fame. Going back and retracing my footsteps—a glib, debunking effort for a shallower, younger, impressionable writer—would be for me a way of seeing who I was, where I went, and what subsequently happened to the places I had seen.
Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned—volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So—writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life, the nearest I will come to autobiography—as the novel is, the short story, and the essay. As Pedro Almodóvar once remarked, "Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism."
The thing to avoid while in my own footsteps would be the tedious reminiscences of better days, the twittering of the nostalgia bore, whose message is usually I was there and you weren't. "I remember when you could get four of those for a dollar." "There was a big tree in a field where that building is now." "In my day..."
Oh, shut up! |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 3 | What traveler backtracked to take the great trip again? None of the good ones that I know. Greene never returned to the Liberian bush, nor to Mexico, nor to Vietnam. In his late fifties, Waugh dismissed modern travel altogether as mere tourism and a waste of time. After 1948, Thesiger did not return to Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter of Arabia. Burton did not mount another expedition to Utah, or to substantiate the source of the Nile—at my age he was living in Trieste, immersed in erotica. Darwin never went to sea again. Neither did Joseph Conrad, who ended up hating the prospect of seafaring. Eric Newby went down the Ganges once, Jonathan Raban down the Mississippi once, and Jan Morris climbed Everest once. Robert Byron did not take the road to Oxiana again, Cherry-Garrard made only one trip to Antarctica, Chatwin never returned to Patagonia, nor did Doughty go back to Arabia Deserta, nor Wallace to the Malay Archipelago, nor Waterton to the Amazon, nor Trollope to the West Indies, nor Edward Lear to Corsica, nor Stevenson to the Cévennes, nor Chekhov to Sakhalin, nor Gide to the Congo, nor Canetti to Marrakesh, nor Jack London to the Solomon Islands, nor Mark Twain to Hawaii. So much for some of my favorite authors.
You could ask, "Why should they bother?" but the fact is that each of these travelers, grown older, would have discovered what the heroic traveler Henry Morton Stanley found when he recrossed Africa from west to east ten years after his first successful crossing from east to west from 1874 to 1877—a different place, with ominous changes, and a new book. Richard Henry Dana added a chastened epilogue to Two Years Before the Mast when, twenty-four years after its publication in 1840, he returned to San Francisco (but no longer traveling in the forecastle) and found that it had changed from a gloomy Spanish mission station with a few shacks to an American boom town that had been transformed by the Gold Rush. Dana was scrupulous about reacquainting himself with people he'd met on his first visit and sizing up the altered landscape, completing, as he put it, "acts of pious remembrance."
Certain poets, notably Wordsworth and Yeats, enlarged their vision and found enlightenment in returning to an earlier landscape of their lives. They set the standard in the literature of revisitation. If it is a writer's lot to repeat the past, writing it in his or her own way, this return journey might be my own prosaic version of "The Wild Swans at Coole" or "Tintern Abbey."
My proposed trip to retrace the itinerary of The Great Railway Bazaar was mainly curiosity on my part, and the usual idleness, with a hankering to be away; but this had been the case thirty-three years before, and it had yielded results. All writing is launching yourself into the darkness, and hoping for light and a soft landing.
"I'm going to do a lot of knitting while you're away," my wife said. That was welcome news. I needed Penelope this time.
Though I had pretended to be jolly in the published narrative, the first trip had not gone as planned.
"I don't want you to go," my first wife had said in 1973—not in a sentimental way, but as an angry demand.
Yet I had just finished a book and was out of ideas. I had no income, no idea for a new novel, and—though I didn't know what I was in for—I hoped that this trip might be a way of finding a subject. I had to go. Sailors went to sea, soldiers went to war, fishermen went fishing, I told her. Writers sometimes had to leave home. "I'll be back as soon as I can."
She resented my leaving. And though I did not write about it, I was miserable when I set off from London, saying goodbye to this demoralized woman and our two small children.
It was the age of aerograms and postcards and big black unreliable telephones. I wrote home often. But I succeeded in making only two phone calls, one from New Delhi and another from Tokyo, both of them futile. And why did my endearments sound unwelcome? I was homesick the whole way—four and a half months of it—and wondered if I was being missed. That was my first melancholy experience of the traveler's long lonely evenings. I was at my wits' end on the trip. I felt insane when I got home. I had not been missed. I had been replaced.
My wife had taken a lover. It was hypocritical of me to object: I had been unfaithful to her. It wasn't her sexual exploit that upset me, but the cozy domesticity. He spent many days and nights in my house, in our bed, romancing her and playing with the children.
I did not recognize my own voice when I howled, "How could you do this?"
She said, "I pretended you were dead."
I wanted to kill this woman, not because I hated her, but (as homicidal spouses often say) because I loved her. I threatened to kill the man who, even after I was home, sent her love letters. I became an angry brute, and by chance I discovered a wickedly helpful thing: threatening to kill someone is an effective way of getting a person's attention.
Instead of killing anyone, or threatening it anymore, I sat in my room and wrote in a fury, abusing my typewriter, trying to lose myself in the book's humor and strangeness. I had a low opinion of most travel books. I wanted to put in everything that I found lacking in the other books—dialogue, characters, discomfort—and to leave out museums, churches, and sightseeing generally. Though it would have added a dimension, I concealed everything about my domestic turmoil. I made the book jolly, and like many jolly books it was written in an agony of suffering, with the regret that in taking the trip I had lost what I valued most: my children, my wife, my happy household.
The book succeeded. I was cured of my misery by more work—an idea I had on the trip for a new novel. Yet something had been destroyed: faith, love, trust, and a belief in the future. After my travel, on my return, I became an outsider, a ghostly presence, with my nose pressed against the window. I understood what it was like to be dead: people might miss you, but their lives go on without you. New people take your place. They sit in your favorite chair and dandle your children on their knees, giving them advice, chucking them under the chin; they sleep in your bed, look at your paintings, read your books, flirt with the Danish nanny; and as they belittle you for having been an overindustrious drudge, they spend your money. Most of the time, your death is forgotten. "Maybe it was for the best," people say, trying not to be morbid.
Some betrayals are forgivable, but others you never quite recover from. Years later, when my children were out of the house, I left that life, that marriage, that country. I began a new life elsewhere.
Now, thirty-three years older, I had returned to London. To my sorrow, about to take the same trip again, I relived much of the pain that I thought I'd forgotten. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 4 | Nothing is more suitable to a significant departure than bad weather. It matched my mood, too, the rain that morning in London, the low brown sky leaking drizzle, darkening the porous city of old stone, and because of it—the rain descending like a burden—everyone was hunched, their wet heads cast down, eyes averted, thinking, Filfy wevva. Traffic was louder, the heavy tires swishing in the wet streets. At Waterloo Station I found the right platform for the Eurostar, the 12:09 to Paris.
Even at Waterloo, the reminders of my old London were almost immediate. The indifference of Londoners, their brisk way of walking, their fixed expressions, no one wearing a hat in the rain yet some carrying brollies—all of us, including honking public school hearties, striding past a gaunt young woman swaddled in dirty quilts, sitting on the wet floor at the foot of some metal steps at the railway station, begging.
And then the simplest international departure imaginable: a cursory security check, French immigration formalities, up the escalator to the waiting train, half empty on a wet weekday in early March. In 1973 I had left from Victoria Station in the morning, got off at the coast at Folkestone, caught the ferry, thrashed across the English Channel, boarded another train at Calais, and did not arrive in Paris until midnight.
That was before the tunnel had been dug under the channel. It had cost $20 billion and taken fifteen years and everyone complained that it was a money loser. Though the train had been running for twelve years, I had never taken it. Never mind the expense—the train through the tunnel was a marvel. I savored the traveler's lazy reassurance that I could walk to the station and sit down in London, read a book, and a few hours later stand up and stroll into Paris without ever leaving the ground. And I intended to go to central Asia the same way, overland to India, just sitting and gaping out the window.
This time, I had been refused a visa to enter Iran, and civilians were being abducted and shot in Afghanistan, but studying a map, I found other routes and railway lines—through Turkey to Georgia and on to the Islamic republics. First Azerbaijan, then a ferry across the Caspian, and then trains through Turkmenistan, past the ancient city of Merv, where there was a railway station, to the banks of the Amu Darya River—Oxiana indeed—and more tracks to Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, within spitting distance of the Punjab railways.
After that, I could follow my old itinerary through India to Sri Lanka and on to Burma. But it was a mistake to anticipate too much so early in the trip, and anyway, here I was a few minutes out of Waterloo, clattering across the shiny rain-drenched rails of Clapham Junction, thinking: I have been here before. On the line through south London, my haunted face at the window, my former life as a Londoner began to pass before my eyes.
Scenes of the seventies, along this very line, through Vauxhall, and making the turn at Queenstown Road, past Clapham High Street and Brixton and across Coldharbour Lane, a name that sent chills through me. Across the common, in 1978, there had been race riots on Battersea Rise, near Chiesman's department store ("Est. 1895"), where clerks sidled up and asked, "Are you being served?" I bought my first color TV set there, near the street on Lavender Hill where Sarah Ferguson, later the Duchess of York, lived; on the day her marriage to Prince Andrew was announced, my charlady, carrying a mop and bucket, sneered, saying, "She's from the gutter."
We were traveling in a deep railway gully, veering away from Clapham Junction, and from the train I got a glimpse of a cinema I had gone to until it became a bingo hall, the church that was turned into a day-care center, and beyond the common the Alfarthing Primary School, where my kids, all pale faces and skinny legs, were taught to sing by Mrs. Quarmby. These were streets I knew well: one where my bike was stolen, another where my car was broken into; greengrocers and butcher shops where I'd shopped; the chippie, the florist, the Chinese grocer; the newsagent, an Indian from Mwanza who liked speaking Swahili with me because he missed the shores of Lake Victoria; the Fishmonger's Arms—known as the Fish—an Irish pub where refugees from Ulster swore obscenely at the TV whenever they saw Prince Charles on it, and laughed like morons the day Lord Mountbatten was blown up by the IRA, and where, every evening, I drank a pint of Guinness and read the Evening Standard; this very place.
From scenes like these I had made my London life. In those days I prayed for rain, because it kept me indoors—writing weather. So much of what I saw today was familiar and yet not the same—the usual formula for a dream. I looked closer. The trees were bare under the gray tattered clouds, and most of the buildings were unchanged, but London was younger, more prosperous. This district that had been semi-derelict when I moved here—empty houses, squatters, a few aging holdouts—had become gentrified. The Chinese grocer's was now a wine shop, and one of the pubs a bistro, and the fish-and-chip shop was a sushi bar.
But the wonderful thing was that I was whisked through south London with such efficiency, I was spared the deeper pain of looking closely at the past. I was snaking through tunnels and across viaducts and railway cuttings, looking left and right at the landscapes of my personal history and, happily, moving on, to other places that held no ambiguous memories. Don't dwell on it, the English say with their hatred of complaint. Mustn't grumble. Stop brooding. It may never happen.
I loved the speed of this train and the knowledge that it wasn't stopping anywhere but just making a beeline to the coast, past Penge, Beckenham, Bromley—the edge of the London map and the old grumpy-looking bungalows I associated with novels of the outer suburbs, the fiction of twitching curtains, low spirits, and anxious families, especially Kipps and Mr. Beluncle, by the Bromleyites H. G. Wells and V. S. Pritchett, who escaped and lived to write about it.
In the satisfying shelf of English literature concerned with what we see from trains, the poems with the lines "O fat white woman whom nobody loves" and "Yes, I remember Adlestrop" stand out, and so do the trains that run up and down the pages of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. But the description that best captures the English railway experience for me is Ford Madox Ford's in his evocation of the city, his first successful book, The Soul of London, published a hundred years ago. Looking out the train window, Ford speaks of how the relative silence of sitting on a train and looking into the busy muted world outside invites melancholy. "One is behind glass as if one were gazing into the hush of a museum; one hears no street cries, no children's calls." And his keenest observation, which was to hold true for me from London to Tokyo: "One sees, too, so many little bits of uncompleted life."
He noted a bus near a church, a ragged child, a blue policeman. I saw a man on a bike, a woman alighting from a bus, schoolchildren kicking a ball, a young mother pushing a pram. And, as this was a panorama of London back gardens, a man digging, a woman hanging laundry, a workman—or was he a burglar?—setting a ladder against a window. And "the constant succession of much smaller happenings that one sees, and that one never sees completed, gives to looking out of train win dows a touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction. It is akin to the sentiment ingrained in humanity of liking a story to have an end."
"Little bits of uncompleted life"—what the traveler habitually sees—inspire pathos and poetry, as well as the maddening sense of being an outsider, jumping to conclusions and generalizing, inventing or recreating places from vagrant glimpses.
It was only twenty minutes from soot-crusted Waterloo to its opposite, the open farmland of Kent, many of the fields already raked by a harrow, plowed and awaiting planting in this first week of March.
"Will you be having wine with your lunch?"
A woman in a blue uniform brought me a bottle of Les Jamelles Chardonnay Vin de Pays d'Oc 2004, praised on the menu for its "subtle vanilla from the oak and a buttery finish."
And then the lunch tray: terrine de poulet et de broccolis, chutney de tomates, the entrée a fillet of lightly peppered salmon, with coup de chocolat for dessert. This was, superficially at least, a different world from the one I had seen on the Railway Bazaar, that long-ago trip to Folkestone, and then standing at the rail of the ferry, feeling guilty and confused, eating a cold pork pie.
The tunnel was a twenty-two-minute miracle, the ultimate rabbit hole, delivering me from my English memories, speeding me beneath the channel to France, where I had only superficial and spotty recollections, of pleasures and misunderstandings, of eating and drinking, of looking at pictures, or hearing oddities, like that of the young pretty French woman who said to me, "I am seeing tonight my fiancé's mistress. I seenk we will have sex. I love stupid women." And then she said, "You are smiling. You Americans!"
After the tunnel, rain falling from the French sky on the tiled roofs and the tiny cars driving on the right, but apart from that it could have been Kent: the same smooth hills and chalky plateau, and the same blight, the same warehouses, the low industrial outbuildings and workshops, the rows of bare poplars in the misty midafternoon.
It was such a swift train trip, and so near was France to England, that it was hard to think of it as a separate country, with its own food and its peculiar scandals and language and religion and dilemmas. Enraged Muslim youths setting cars on fire was one of the current problems; only one death but lots of blazing Renaults.
Why is the motorway culture drearier in Europe than anywhere in America? Perhaps because it is imitative and looks hackneyed and unstylish and ill fitting, the way no European looks quite right in a baseball cap. While the gas stations and industrial parks matched the disposable dreariness of American architecture, set against a French landscape they looked perverse, with Gothic spires and haywains and medieval chalets in the distance, like a violation of an old trust, the compact villages and plowed fields and meadows set off by ugly roads and crash barriers.
Because of what Freud called "the narcissism of minor differences," all these open fields, battlegrounds since ancient times, were the landscapes of contending armies, a gory example of civilization and its discontents. And so whatever else one could say, it was a fact that the route of this railway, once soaked in blood and thick with the graves of dead soldiers—millions of them—had been serene for the past half century, perhaps its longest period of peace.
We crossed a river with a tragic name. One day in July ninety years ago, where the soft rain fell on the lovely meadows and low hills, in sight of the distant spires of Amiens on one side of the train and the small town of Péronne on the other, the valley of this river, the Somme, had been an amphitheater of pure horror. On that first day of battle, 60,000 British soldiers were killed, plodding slowly because of the 66-pound packs on their backs. They advanced into German machine-gun fire, the largest number of soldiers killed on one day in British history. In the four months of this bloodbath, the first battle of the Somme, which ended in November 1916, more than one million soldiers were killed—British 420,000; French 194,000; German 440,000. And to no purpose. Nothing was gained, neither land nor any military advantage, nor even a lesson in the futility of war, for twenty-five years later—in my own lifetime—the same armies were at it again, warring in these same fields. All of them were colonial powers, which had annexed vast parts of Africa and Asia, to take their gold and diamonds, and lecture them on civilization.
The colors and clothes of the pedestrians on the streets nearer Paris reflected French colonial history—Africans, West Indians, Algerians, Vietnamese. They were kicking soccer balls in the rain. They were shoppers in the street markets, residents of the dreary tower blocks and tenements, the public housing at the edge of Paris that the Eurostar was passing and penetrating. We entered the city of mellow cheese-like stone and pitted façades and boulevards. London is largely a low city of single-family homes—terraces, cottages, townhouses, mews houses, bungalows, semi-detached villas. Paris is a city of rococo apartment buildings, bosomy with balconies, not a house to be seen.
With my small bag and a briefcase I looked such a lightweight that the porters at the Gare du Nord ignored me. I passed through the station to the front entrance, in the floodlit glow of the lovely façade with its classical-looking statues representing the cities and larger towns of France. They were sculpted in the early 1860s by (so a sign said) "the greatest names in the Second Empire."
The streets were thick with unmoving cars and loud honking and angry voices. I asked a smiling man what the problem was.
"Un manifestation" he said.
"Why today?"
He shrugged. "Because it's Tuesday."
Every Tuesday there was a large, riotous demonstration in Paris. But for its size and its disruption this one was to be known as Black Tuesday. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | The other Orient Express | A national crisis is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eyewitness. Purgatorial as a crisis sometimes is for a traveler, it is preferable to public holidays, which are hell: no one working, shops and schools closed, natives eating ice cream, public transport jammed, and the stranger's sense of being excluded from the merriment—from everything. A holiday is an occasion for utter alienation; a crisis can be spectacle, seizing the stranger's attention.
The reason Paris has the luminous quality of being a stage set is that it was redesigned with that theatrical aim in mind, around 1857, by Georges Haussmann (hired by Louis Napoleon, calling himself emperor), who destroyed its houses and slums in mass evictions, flattened its alleyways and lanes, and gave it wide boulevards, soaring mansion blocks, monuments and fountains, and the big-city conceit of seeming to be at the center of the world. The city was remade in a single style.
Paris's ornate backdrop of beautiful biscuit-colored buildings and extravagant arches and obelisks—the imperial city, complete with floodlights—is so fixed in people's minds, especially people who've never seen it, that describing it is irrelevant. And anyway, who bothers? In the fiction of Paris, it is enough for the writer to state the name of a boulevard or a district. Take Simenon. I happened to be reading his novels, for their portability and their oddness. "He returned to Rue des Feuillantines by a long detour in order to go to Montsouris Park"—no more than that; the place is taken for granted, as fixed as a picture on a calendar. The mention of evocative names is description enough. Nothing to discover, nothing to show; the city looms, but instead of feeling dwarfed, the big-city dweller feels important.
Yet this apparent familiarity, one of the powerful attractions of Paris, is an illusion. "Couleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations," Nabokov once wrote, "and local color is not a fast color." The brilliant Parisian stage set has a long history of insurrections, mob violence, unrest, and the extreme humiliation of foreign occupation—in the experience of many Parisians alive now, the memory of Germans in charge, the betrayals, the shame of surrender. Once a city's boulevards have been marched by triumphant Nazis, they never look quite so grand again. Like many of its decorous women, Paris, while appearing inviolate, has had a turbulent past, been raped and pillaged and bombed and besieged, and has gone on changing, like its sister city, London, and the other cities on my itinerary: Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Istanbul, Ankara, Tbilisi, Baku, and the rest of the glittering anthills of Asia, as far as Tokyo.
I seldom feel uplifted in a city; on the contrary, I feel oppressed and confined. In my travels I have been more interested in the places that lay between the great cities than the cities themselves: the hinterland, not the capital. It is my suspicion that people who are glamoured by big cities and think of themselves as urbane and thoroughly metropolitan are at heart country mice—simple, fearful, overdomesticated provincials, dazzled by city lights.
So the car burnings of a month before and the present crisis in Paris were revelations. I don't believe in the immutability of cities. I think of them generally as snake pits, places to escape from. But this manifestation—a huge noisy mob at (so the smiling man had told me) the Place de la République—had brought the city to a halt. Perhaps something to see—certainly a rowdy mob was more of a draw than anything I might look at in the Louvre.
I found a taxi. The driver was sitting comfortably, listening to the radio, his chin resting on his fist.
"Place de la République," I said, getting into the car.
"Not easy," he said. "It's the manifestation."
"What's the problem?"
"They're angry," he said, and he mentioned the debonair prime minister, who wrote and published his own poetry, and who wanted to change the labor laws.
More minutes passed, during which the driver made a call on his cell phone. Predictably, he reported that he was stuck in traffic.
"Also, it's raining."
Recognizing a fellow taxi driver, he leaned out the window and began bantering. Then he interrupted himself, saying to me, "And there's road-work on the Boulevard Saint-Germain."
When we had gone nowhere and the meter showed 10 euros—$13, for about fifty yards—I said, "Then I think I'll go to the Gare de l'Est."
"Better to walk there—it's just past that street and down some steps."
I got out, walked back to the Gare du Nord, bought a newspaper, and saw signs to the Gare de l'Est. Crossing the street, I was distracted by a pleasant-looking restaurant, the Brasserie Terminus Nord, the sort of warm, well-lighted, busy eatery that made me hungry on this cold wet day.
I told myself that this was a farewell meal, and ordered a half bottle of white burgundy, salad, and bouillabaisse marseillaise—a big bowl of fish, mussels, large crabs, small toy-like crabs, and prawns in a saffron-tinted broth, with croutons and rémoulade. The waiters were friendly and went about their business with eficiency and politeness and good humor.
Noticing my bag, one said, "Taking a trip?"
"Going to Istanbul. On the train." And I thought: Also Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and onward...
"Nice trip."
"To Budapest tonight, then tomorrow night to Romania. I have a question." I tapped the newspaper. "What is the meaning of licenciement?"
"It means losing your job."
"That's what the manifestation is about?"
"Exactly."
He explained: The prime minister proposed changing the law to make it easier to fire workers who, in France, had jobs for life, since firing them was almost impossible. But the young people had risen up against the change—as did the unions, the communists, and workers generally, because job security was considered sacred. If French jobs were not protected (it was argued), they would be taken by immigrant Poles and Al-banians, leaving the social order in tatters and cultural life under siege by foreigners.
I finished my meal, talked with the waiters, and made a few notes. From these few hours in France I could conclude that French waiters are friendly and informative, French food is delicious, French taxi drivers have a sense of humor, and Paris is rainy. In other words, generalize on the basis of one afternoon's experience. This is what travel writers do: reach conclusions on the basis of slender evidence. But I was only passing through; I saw very little. I was just changing trains en route to Asia.
I continued on my way, walking to the Gare de l'Est, found a steep old staircase that was cut into the slope of the narrow road. A stenciled sign in French on the pavement said, The greatest danger is passivity.
Inside the station, at the far end of this road, a milling crowd with upturned faces searched the departure board for platform assignments. I saw my train listed—to Vienna. This information was confirmed by a voice on the loudspeaker: "Platform nine, for the Orient Express to Mulhouse, Strasbourg, and Vienna"
My train was called the Orient Express? I was surprised to hear that. All I had was a set of inexpensive tickets: Paris-Budapest-Bucharest-Istanbul, necessitating my changing trains in each city, three nights on sleeping cars. There are two ways by train to Istanbul—my rattly roundabout way, on three separate trains, and the luxurious way. It so happened that the luxury train was at an adjacent platform, its sleeping cars lettered Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits, a grand sendoff, with an old-fashioned limo parked on the platform lettered Pullman Orient Express—pour aller au bout de vos rêves (to take you to the limit of your dreams).
This waiting train, which was not my train, was the sumptuous, blue and gold Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, which had run from Paris to Istanbul from 1883 until 1977. It was a ghost of its former self (one sleeping car, no dining car, grouchy conductor) when I took it in 1973, and it was canceled altogether four years later. Its rusted and faded carriages were offered at auction in Monte Carlo, and all of them, all its rolling stock, bought by an American businessman. He plowed $16 million into restoring the coaches and bringing back the luster. He bought a version of the name, too, and restarted this luxury train in 1982. It has been a success with the nostalgic rich.
It was not my train because, one, it was too expensive: it would have cost me around $9,000, one way, from Paris to Istanbul. Reason two: luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living—indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.
I was on the other Orient Express, traveling through eastern Europe to Turkey. The total was about $400 for the three days and three nights, not luxurious (from the looks of the train at the Gare de l'Est) but pleasant and efficient.
"You will take this seat," the conductor said, indicating a place in a six-seat compartment. "You will change at Strasbourg for the sleeping car."
Only one other passenger so far, an elderly woman. I sat down and drowsed until I was woken by a few toots on the train whistle, and off we went, this other Orient Express, pulling out of the Gare de l'Est without ceremony. After a mile or so of the glorious city, we were rushing through a suburb and then along the banks of the River Marne, heading into the hinterland of eastern France in the lowering dusk.
Traveling into the darkness of a late-winter evening, knowing that I would be waking up in Vienna only to change trains, I felt that my trip had actually begun, that everything that had happened until now was merely a prelude. What intensified this feeling was the sight of the sodden, deep green meadows, the shadowy river, the bare trees, a chilly feeling of foreignness, and the sense that I had no clear idea where I was but only the knowledge that late tonight we would be passing through Strasbourg on the German border and tomorrow morning we'd be in Austria, and around noon in Budapest, where I'd catch another train. The rhythm of these clanging rails and the routine of changing trains would lead me into central Asia, since it was just a sequence of railway journeys from here to Tashkent in Uzbekistan.
A lovely feeling warmed me, the true laziness of the long-distance traveler. There was no other place I wished to be than right here in the corner seat, slightly tipsy from the wine and full of bouillabaisse, the rain lashing the window.
I did not know it then, of course, but I would be traveling through rain and wind all the way through Turkey, on the Black Sea coast, through Georgia, and as far as Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, and would not be warm—would be wearing a woolly sweater and a thick jacket—until I was in the middle of Turkmenistan, among praying Turkmen, mortifying themselves and performing the dusty ritual of waterless ablutions, called tayammum, also on a train, but a dirty and loudly clattering one, in the Karakum Desert, where it never rained.
The little old lady caught my eye, and perhaps noticing that the book I had in my lap was in English, said, "It's snowing in Vienna."
With the pleasant thought that I would be in Istanbul in a few days, I said, "That's all right with me. Where are we now?"
"Château-Thierry. Épernay."
French place names always seemed to call up names of battlefields or names on wine labels. The next station was Châlons en Champagne, a bright platform in the drizzle, and the tidy houses in the town looking like a suburb in Connecticut seen through the prism of the driving rain. Then, in the darkness, Nancy, the rain glittering as it spattered from the eaves of the platform, and a few miles farther down the line, clusters of houses so low and mute they were like the grave markers of people buried here.
Somewhere a woman and two men had joined the old woman and me in the compartment. These three people talked continuously and incomprehensibly, one man doing most of the yakking and the others chipping in.
"What language are they speaking?" the old woman asked me.
"Hungarian, I think."
She said she had no idea, and asked why I was so sure.
I said, "When you don't understand a single word, it's usually Hungarian."
"It could be Bulgarian. Or Czech."
"Where do you live?" I asked.
"Linz," she said.
"Isn't that where—?"
Before I finished the sentence she laughed very hard, cutting me off, her eyes twinkling, smiling at what we both knew, and said, "It's a charming little city. About a quarter of a million people. Very clean, very comfortable. Not what you might think. We want to forget all that business."
"All that business" meant that Adolf Hitler, the Jackdaw of Linz, had been born there, and his house still stood, some deluded people making pilgrimages, though all the symbolism and language of Nazism was illegal in Austria. Just about this time, the writer David Irving was given a jail sentence and punished for making the irrational claim in print that the Holocaust had not happened. It was as loony as saying the earth was flat, but in Austria it was unlawful.
"They're coming back in France," the old woman said.
"Nazis, you mean?"
"My daughter says so. She lives in Paris. I go to visit her." She looked out the window—nothing to see but her own reflection.
"I take this train all the time."
"You could fly, maybe?" I asked, only to hear what she would say.
"Flying is horrible. Always delays in this weather. This is much better. We will be in Linz early tomorrow morning, and I will be home for breakfast." She leaned over again and whispered, "Who are they?"
She was perhaps seventy-five or so, and had lived (so she said) her whole life in Austria. Next door to Hungary all that time and she didn't have a clue about this just-over-the-border language, could not even identify Magyar-speakers, which they were—I asked them on the platform at Strasbourg, where we waited for the sleeping car.
Ten o'clock on a cold night in March, the rain smacking the rails; some carriages slid along the platform on creaking wheels, with the welcome word Schlafwagen on the side, lettered in gilt. Why was it I felt no excitement entering a great hotel on a rainy night like this but was thrilled to climb up the stairs of a sleeping car and hand my ticket to a conductor and be shown a couchette? The bed was made, a bottle of mineral water on a little shelf; a sink, a table, a ripe orange on a plate.
I read a bit of Simenon, snuggling under my comforter, as the train pulled out of Strasbourg in the streaks of rain that sparkled, seemingly crystallized by the lights of the city. A few miles farther on, the darts of rain pocked the surface of the Rhine. And I slept—it had been a long day, beginning at Waterloo, and all those memories of London. I was glad to be in a strange land, in dramatic weather, headed for places even stranger.
In the gray light of early morning, near a station called Amstetten, the snow was like the dirty snow in the Simenon novel I was reading, "piles of it that looked like they were rotting, stained black, peppered with garbage. The white powder that loosed itself from the sky in small handfuls, like plaster falling from a ceiling." But it was much whiter at a later station, Purkersdorf Sanatorium, its hundred-year-old hospital an architectural oddity, cubist in design. The snow was deeper farther east, where villas stood by the line, stately chapels, sheep in muddy fields, and cemeteries dense with pious statuary. The Austrian houses looked bomb-proof, indestructible, with gardens of black saplings in the drifted snow.
Vienna for me was just its station and the very platform where Freud diagnosed his own Reisefieber—the anxiety of traveling by rail. He was so fearful of missing a train, he would arrive at the station an hour early, and usually panicked when the train pulled in. Here I got another train, slightly shabby, probably Magyar, for the leg to Budapest, where we were to arrive at noon. Even the landscape was shabbier, flatter, the snow thinner and lying in filthy twists as we rumbled over the border at the Hungarian frontier of GyŐr, which was a set of solid buildings dating from the time when this was one of the rusted folds in the Iron Curtain, factories and stubbly fields, bare trees and the late-winter farmland scored with plow marks and skeletal with ribs of snow. "Farmland" seems a pastoral and serene description, but this was the opposite, so dark and dreary, with burst-open barns and broken fences, it looked less like farmland than a sequence of battlefields in a long retreat, the evidence of ambushes in a rear-guard action that ended in a smudge at the horizon, which grew and became human, a yokel on a bicycle.
Blackbirds streaked low across the winter sky over the thick Hungarian hills and ditches and brown copses that were all smeared with discolored snow like stale cake icing, the dark landscape of early morning in eastern Europe, jumping in the train window like the tortured frames of an old movie.
The appeal of traveling through this wintry scene, just a few people on the train, the flat open land—What do they grow here? I wondered—the pleasure of it was its stark and rather romantic ugliness, and the knowledge that I was just passing through. I'd be in Budapest in a few hours, Bucharest tomorrow, Istanbul the next day. This sort of travel, an exercise in sheer idleness, was also a way of wallowing in the freedom of this trip.
Thirty-three years before, I had been anxious. Where was I going? What would I do with the experience of travel? I was oppressed by the sense that the people I loved most disapproved of my going. You're abandoning us! I don't want you to go. You'll be sorry!
In that mood of reproach, feeling scolded, I had looked out the window of a slightly different route—Yugoslavia—and hated what I saw, feeling futile among the muddy hills and resenting every obstacle, as though the trip I'd chosen to take was just an elaborate encumbrance. But I was happy now, and happiness lends, if not enchantment, then a merciful detachment. I did not see the route I was traveling as enemy territory. It looked disheveled and mild and a bit forlorn, but I didn't take it personally.
The lesson in my Tao of Travel was that if one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier. I thought that anyone who has lived through the latter half of the twentieth century is unshockable, and so has a better time of it, with lower expectations, a contempt for political promises. After a certain age the traveler stops looking for another life and takes nothing for granted.
And this time my wife was on the phone. She had prevailed on me to bring a hand-held device that doubled as cell phone and Internet receiver. I had resisted. I had traveled for more than forty years without feeling the need to be in close touch. And I hated the sight of people using cell phones as much as I hated the sight of people eating and walking at the same time—the unembarrassed indulgence, making a private ceremony into a public act, almost as a boast, braying into the damned thing and to the world at large: Hey, honey, I'm on a train! Pretty soon I'm going to be in a tunnel!
I had forgotten I had the instrument. I switched it on and got a screen message, Welcome to Hungary, and soon after that it rang again.
"I miss you," my wife said. "But I want you to know that I'm on your side. I know you have to take this trip."
"How's the knitting?"
"I haven't started. I'm still looking over the patterns."
I found her procrastination oddly reassuring, and we talked a little more, she at home and I on a train, looking out at the snowy fields outside a city of factories and tenements called Tatabanya, less than an hour from Budapest. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 6 | The sight of the old pockmarked city of puddles, smutty under the snowmelt, Keleti Station looming like a Hungarian madhouse in the rain, the slushy streets and muddy sidewalks, defrosting and dripping after the long winter—all of it made me hopeful. I wasn't looking for glamour or a version of home, but rather something altogether different, as proof that I'd covered some distance. Grim-faced women in old clothes, carrying shopping bags, scuffing through the slush in dirty boots, held out signs lettered Zimmer, offering their houses or apartments for home stays, to make a little money in an economy that had tanked so badly that people were leaving in droves—mobbing Keleti Station for the trains going west to Austria and Germany and Britain. I was crowded by taxi touts and pimps, not pestiferous but merely desperate for money.
I dumped my bag at Left Luggage—my train to Romania was not due to leave until late that evening—and walked out to look at the grandiose edifice of the station, with its statues and winged chariot, stallions and feather-and-floral motifs, dated 1884, an Austro-Hungarian extravaganza, grandiose and pompous, seeming to mock the weary travelers in wet raincoats and the footsore pedestrians with shopping bags.
"How's business?" I asked a woman at a bookstore.
"Is bad," she said.
I kept on asking as I strolled from the station, through the city to the Danube, for the pleasure of taking it all in, with the confidence that in eight or nine hours I would be back at the station to claim my bag and board a new train for Bucharest, the continuation of my own Orient Express.
It was about this time in my previous trip that I'd met the traveling companion I called Molesworth. He was a theatrical agent and bon vivant, unmarried, and his being a little fruity and familiar added to his twinkle. His clients had been some of the acting Cusacks and Warren Mitchell. A former officer in the Indian army, he had traveled widely in Asia. He winked into a monocle when he read a menu, and had a gentle habit of calling every man "George," as when speaking to the Turkish conductor: "George, this train has seen its better days." After my book came out, he said people recognized him in the text, even through a pseudonym. I saw him now and then in London and invited him to parties, where he made himself popular with his theater stories, all about luvvies, and afterwards my friends would say, "Terry is splendid." Before he died, he said the trip in 1973 to Istanbul was one of the best he'd ever made, and often added, "You should have mentioned my name." But his real name was too good to be true: Terrance Plunkett-Greene.
I trudged through the downpour with all the other trudgers until I came to a plausible-looking hotel called the Nemzeti, and went in, just to get out of the rain.
The restaurant was empty except for two women, wearing leather coats and smoking.
Wasn't I hungry? the pale waiter asked me. Wouldn't I be happier sitting in the warm restaurant and having the lunch of the day?
I agreed. Goulash was on the menu.
"Foreign people think goulash is stew. No. Goulash is soup."
"But what does the word mean?"
"I don't know in English. But a goulash is someone who looks after sheep."
"Red ink!" Plunkett-Greene would have said of the Hungarian wine. "Peasant fare! Beans!" he would have crowed over the food here at the Nemzeti.
The women left. A youngish man took their place. As he was the only other person in the restaurant, we fell into conversation. His name was Istvan. He was in Budapest on business. He said that some European companies were relocating to Hungary because of the cheap labor and the well-educated (but poverty-stricken) populace. I was to hear this description all the way through Asia, especially in India. His own business concerned small engines.
"How is the government here?"
"Terrible," Istvan said. He detested Hungarian politicians and their policies. "They are socialists. They are left. I am right."
This led to a discussion about the American government, which he also detested.
"Bush is dangerous, arrogant—not intelligent. And now we have to worry about what he'll do in Iran."
I should have guessed then that I was to hear this opinion in almost every casual conversation for the next seven months, whenever I revealed myself as an American: that our president was a moron and his policies were diabolical and he was controlled by dark forces. That America, for all its promise and prosperity, was the world's bully.
I would then say, as I did to Istvan, "Would you emigrate to the U.S. if you had a chance?" And they would say yes, as Istvan did, not because they had the slightest notion of American culture, politics, or history, but because they were passionate to get a job and make money, to own a car, a house, and flee their precarious hand-to-mouth existence to become Americans.
Istvan was fairly intelligent, but there were others, and the most unsettling thing was that the worst of them, the most brutish, would surprise me by praising the U.S. government for its militarism. I was somewhat apprehensive because I would be traveling through at least six Muslim countries. But all of them were tyrannies, more or less, and I took heart in knowing that when people are badly governed, they seldom hold you personally responsible for the decisions of your own government.
I wished Istvan luck and plodded on, making a detour at a sex shop. Acting on my theory that a country's pornography offers the quickest insight into the culture and inner life of a nation, and especially the male character, I went in and assessed the goods. It was grubby stuff, which included bestiality (dogs and women), very fat people, very hairy people, a sideline in gay cruelty, and every German perversion.
Like Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and the other countries formerly in the Soviet shadow, when Hungary liberalized its policies in 1989 the immediate effect was the sanctioning of what had been regarded as antisocial behavior—porno, loud music, vocal complaints, and graffiti, which had been obvious from the walls I had seen on the outskirts of Budapest. Some of these promiscuous outbursts could have been dismissed as rising from irrational anger, but not porno. Pornography is specific, particular in its rituals and images, and it can't be gratuitous or faked or cooked up for its shock value, or else it won't sell. Shelves of videocassettes and DVDs of bestiality—women canoodling with dogs and horses, pigs and goats—meant that there was a market for it.
In the sleety rain and wet snow of the decaying city, amid shuffling boots (down at the heels in the most literal sense), wet faces, and stringy hair, there was no sensuality, certainly no temptation for me to linger. Nothing looked sleazier to me than another imperial city overlaid by decades of Soviet style. Yet everyone I spoke to—for I was constantly asking directions—was polite to me, every one of the fatigued, greasy-haired people, scruffy in the late-winter drizzle. I seem to be criticizing, but I liked Budapest for being in a time warp and looking left behind.
I could not identify a Hungarian face—not a national face. The heavy jaw and wide forehead and close-set eyes were not enough; yet it seemed a monolithic culture—no ethnic people, no minorities in evidence, just a lot of weary white people, relieved that Hungary had been admitted to the European Union so that they could leave and find work elsewhere and maybe never come back, as a man said to me at a café in Keleti Station when I went to reclaim my bag.
"You're going where?" he asked.
I told him Romania, and he made me repeat it because he found it so funny. He laughed a big, mocking belly laugh.
From Hungary onward, it was clear to me that very few people are looking east. There were no tourists, and the only travelers were ones going home—reluctantly, because the great wish was to travel west, to leave home. The east represented hopelessness, poverty, failure, more excuses. Most of the travelers at Keleti Station wanted to go west, even the ones who were headed east. And no one was going to Turkey.
With the drunks, the drifters, the flinty-eyed evangelists looking for sinners to convert, the moneychangers, the lurking youngsters who might have been druggies or hookers or both, and the burdened old women heading to the countryside on commuter trains, the people who held my attention at Keleti Station were the chess players. They stood at a long marble pedestal near the bumpers, in the middle of the crowd of commuters waiting for their trains to be announced. Or perhaps they weren't going anywhere: a train station is a little democracy in which everyone has a right to exist on the presumption that he or she might be waiting for a train. These men were studying the chessboards, clawing at their hair and their beards, now and then making a move—the slow and graceful logic of chess at the center of railway pandemonium. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 7 | The passengers who boarded the Euronight, the express to Bucharest, were Romanian—I was traveling against the prevailing current of people headed west. Who would take the train to Romania if they didn't have to? I was told that in recent years foreigners who wished to adopt Romanian orphans took this train from time to time, but because so many adoption agencies were fraudulent, fewer outsiders were willing to risk what might prove to be a disappointment.
I liked the way this train journey was removing me from things I knew, replacing them with the distortions of the foreign—the dream dimension of travel where things are especially strange because they look somewhat familiar. Fewer people, too, as though no one wanted to go where I was going, especially now, in the muddy landscape of Hungary, the drizzle crackling into the wet clumps of snow by the tracks.
Even here, still in Europe, I sensed an intimation of Asiatic ambiguity in the cat-stink of the sleeping car, the unsmiling crowd suffering in second-class hard seats, the clutter of the dining car: piles of fluorescent tubes in cardboard boxes and coils of wire stacked on the tables, with sticky cruets of vinegar and bottles of sinister sauce, their caps clotted with spilled and dried gunk.
Racing into the darkness and the downpour, dramatic weather smothering the tracks, whistle screaming, this train is perfect, this sleeper is a cozy throwback, I was writing in my notebook. It reminded me pleasantly, in sepia tones and inexpensiveness (about $100), of my previous trip. I had taken a diesel through Belgrade and Nis and Sophia before, but so what? This was not much different—sullen men in track suits, women in shawls, tired glassy-eyed children shivering in small wet shoes.
As on the previous night en route to Budapest, the sleeping-car conductor punched my ticket, brought me beer, made my bed, and reminded me that we'd be in Bucharest around nine the following morning.
"Why you go Bucharest?"
"To look around," I said. "And then leave."
"You airplane home?"
"I change trains. To Istanbul."
"Istanbul very nice. Good business. Good money."
"What about Bucharest?"
"No business. No money." The conductor made a clown's mocking face.
"Is there a dining car on this train?"
"Everything—for you!" When he winked at me I could see that he was tipsy.
Rain was smacking the window, the train swaying as most trains do, seeming to describe an elaborate detour around the back of the world. I was going the old way, as I had long ago, and there was hardly any difference—Budapest had had the strained and uncertain and unstylish look of the seventies.
Even though no one advertised a trip like this, it had not been much trouble to find this antique railway experience—railways and buses were how the poor traveled in much of eastern Europe. Most tourists going to Romania, if they went at all, would take a short-hop plane. European airfares were very cheap because they were based on fuel that was sold untaxed. Someday soon a fuel tax would be imposed, airfares would reflect their true cost, and this train would be valuable again. Well, it was valuable now—the sleeping car almost full and the rest of the train crowded.
A sudden station loomed, blobs of fluorescence in the darkness, the storm sweeping down, bursting in oversized drops on an unsheltered platform, the right texture of raindrops for this dark, creaking night train. The weather looked old-fashioned, so did the leaky roof of the station, the puddles in the ticket lobby, the wet benches, the utter emptiness. No one got on or off: just a station sitting in the dark—I saw it was Szolnok, on the Tisza River—and after that we were really benighted. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 8 | Remembering the conductor's wink, I went in search of the dining car, walking through the passageway of the dark tipping train making anvil clangs in the night.
And when I found it I thought: Just at the point in my life when I'd imagined that all travel was a homogenized and bland experience of plastic food and interchangeable railway cars and waiters in fast-food caps, I stumble into the dining car of the Euronight to Romania and find three drunken conductors and a man (who turned out to be the chef) in a greasy sweater with a torn bandage unraveling on his hand, all of them playing backgammon in the bad light, drinking beer, and smoking. No one was eating, and when the chef blew his nose messily he looked as if he were using a rag that had just wiped a dipstick.
Nor had the boxes of fluorescent tubes and coils of wire stacked on the tables been moved or tidied. They crowded the gunked-up sauce bottles.
At the sight of this filth and disorder, my spirits rose. It was easy to prettify a nation in an airport, but on this train traveling through the provinces of a hard-pressed country I felt I was seeing the real thing, a place with its pants down. I didn't take this personally. I was grateful that no one had gone to any trouble for me, that I was not getting red-carpet service.
The chef did not even look up from his backgammon board when he said, "Eat!"
Another, the man who had winked, said, "Sit! Sit! You want chicken?"
"No."
"Only chicken. Sit!"
He pushed some coils of wire to the far side of one of the tables—I was apparently the only diner—and then the lights went out. When the lights came on again there was a bowl of bread crusts in front of me, which seemed a neat trick.
"Salade?"
"No."
I was served a bowl of dill pickles. I thought: Who could invent this? Merely to live here was to experience satire.
Tipsy though he was, the conductor was able to form the words "You lock couchette?"
"How could I lock it?I don't have a key."
Without a word, in a kind of reflex of drunken panic, he ran out of the dining car. I followed him, and when he got to my compartment he motioned for me to check my bag. He gave me to understand, in gestures, that there were thieves on the train and that I must be very careful (wagging his finger, then touching it to the side of his nose).
The lights went out before we got back to the dining car, but came on again in time for me to see the man in the filthy sweater (and now I knew why it was greasy) standing over a frying pan, holding a cleaver, and sending up sparks and spatters. He could not remove the cigarette from his mouth, because he was holding the frying pan with one hand and smacking at a piece of meat with the other. His smeared glasses were slipping down his nose; he pushed them up with a deft nudge of his dripping cleaver.
He yelled at the others, one of whom relayed the message to me: "Gratin?"
"Okay."
Then the backgammon players began bantering with each other.
When the plate was put before me I marveled at the man serving me: his sticky glasses, his drooping cigarette, his dirty sweater and bandaged hand. The fried potatoes were coated with cheese. I picked at it, grateful for the reassurance that in this corner of the world nothing had changed in decades. And the next time someone praised the Hungarian economy or talked optimistically of Romania's imminent entry into the European Union, I could reflect on the revelation of this disgusting meal.
While the rest of the world was bent on innovation and modernization, looking for salvation on the Internet, things here were pretty much what they'd always been. Speaking of time warps, Hungary was about to elect another socialist government. For some reason, perhaps the sheer perversity that finds absurd logic still alive in the world, this pleased me. It reminded me of the time I'd spent in Vanuatu, in the western Pacific. One rainy day I saw some people on the island of Tanna standing and squatting, bollocky naked, wearing only penis sheaths and refusing to listen to some missionaries who had come across the ocean to convert them. These God-botherers had then trekked twenty miles down a muddy path to share their Good News Bibles. The people on Tanna sent them away, saying they had their own gods, thanks very much.
Stubborn seediness has great appeal, and this ramshackle railway had not changed in thirty-three years. It was, if anything, worse, almost a parody of my previous experience. The Hungarian border was farcical too, the customs-and-immigration people tramping through the carriage in wet boots and ill-fitting brown uniforms. The Romanian border at Curtici was even grimmer, as though another act in the same farce: big beefy-faced brutes with earflaps and gold braids, a dozen of them swarming over the train demanding passports, opening bags.
One of the customs men went through my books, the Simenons and some others, and selected Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. He squinted at it. Did he guess that this novel is about injustice in a nightmarish police state?
"Where you going?"
"Istanbul."
"What doing? You tourismus?"
"Me tourismus."
Turning the pages of my passport, he put his fingers on the visas. "Azerbaijan! Uzbekistan! Pakistan! India!"
"Tourismus."
He flipped his big fingers at me. "Heroin? Cocaine?"
I laughed, I tried to stop laughing, I laughed some more, and I think this idiotic laugh convinced him of my innocence. His comrade joined him, and together they searched my briefcase. I stood to one side, and when they were done they welcomed me to Romania.
Their baggage fondling was no worse than the TSA's at any American airport. In fact, it was a lot simpler and less invasive.
Just behind these customs men was an attractive woman wearing an ankle-length leather coat and high shiny boots, another figure from the past, a suitable introduction to Transylvania, where we were headed, and like a character in the Nabokov novel, which could have happened in a place like Bucharest. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 9 | The rain was still falling as, with howling brakes, the train came to a dead stop at Baneasa Station in the center of Bucharest, where I was to change trains—the next one, for Istanbul, leaving later in the day. The rain spattered on the oily locomotive and the platform roof and the muddy tracks. But this was not life-giving rain, nourishing roots and encouraging growth. It was something like a blight. It spat from the dreary sky, smearing everything it hit, rusting the metal joints of the roof, weakening the station, fouling the tracks. It lent no romance to the decaying houses of the city; it made them look frailer, emphasized the cracks in the stucco, turned the window dust to mud. There was something so poisonous in its greenish color, it seemed to me like acid rain.
Pale, pop-eyed Romanians had a touch of Asia in their dark eyes and hungry faces, and almost the first people I saw were two urchins, very skinny boys not more than ten, in rags, looking ill, both smoking cigarettes and pretending to be tough. They had tiny doll-like heads and dirty hands. They fooled among themselves and puffed away, and when they saw me they said something, obviously rude, and laughed.
Only pale, underfed faces—now and then one of a girl that was porcelain-pretty; skinny girls, fat women, tough-looking men, most people smoking foul cigarettes—no foreign faces, none that I could see at the station. Why would anyone come here? Romania was a world few people visited for pleasure, and that was evident in its abandoned look, its wrecked buildings, its mournful people. It seemed lifeless, just hanging on. A great melancholy in the houses with cracked windows, the broken streets, the bakery shops where every pastry looked stale.
I went to make sure that the train to Istanbul, the Bosfor Express, would be leaving on time. A young man standing near the information booth said he hoped it would—he was taking it.
"I'm going to a conference in Turkey," he said. He was an academic, named Nikolai, teaching at a university in Bucharest.
He showed me where the Left Luggage window was—he was leaving bags there too. On the way, I mentioned that I hadn't seen any foreigners—none of the Asians or Africans or South Americans I'd noticed from London to Hungary.
"Some Americans come here. We have bases."
I might have known. Romania was in the news as America's friend in the war on terrorism. Its right-wing government, desperate for money, eager to join the European Union, had approved the imprisoning and interrogation of suspects. The process, called extraordinary rendition, meant that a man like the one described in the New York Times in July 2006 from Algeria, who was picked up by American agents in Tanzania, would be blindfolded and sent to a third country to be questioned—and questioning always involved some sort of torture, ranging from sleep deprivation, to the suffocation and simulated drowning called waterboarding, to being hanged by the wrists against the wall of a cell, all these methods going under the Orwellian euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques." I never heard that expression without thinking of a prisoner being kicked in the balls.
America's prisoners from across the world were shipped off to, among other places, jails in Romania, where humane conventions did not have to be observed and torture was allowed. But the incarceration and interrogation had been instigated by the United States and paid for by American taxpayers. The program was so secret that it was only when, after two or more years, a prisoner was released and interviewed by a newspaper (as several had) that the despicable program was revealed. Poland was also mentioned as a country of interrogation under torture.
Nikolai said he had things to do but would see me on the train. I had the feeling I'd made him uncomfortable with my questions and that he simply wanted to get away.
The largest, weirdest building in Europe—perhaps the world—the Palace of Congresses, is in Bucharest. I had thought it was within walking distance. I ended up taking a taxi—or perhaps not a taxi but a volunteer driver eager to make a little money.
The building was an impressively ugly and gigantic example of megalomaniacal architecture.
"Is amazing, eh?"
"Amazing."
"You have zis in your country?"
"Nothing like it"
On the way, we had passed many casinos. They were the only splash of color in the brown city, along with smoky bars and massage parlors. It was a city of sullen, desperate vice. The driver gave me a copy of What's On in Bucharest. This guide offered tips on how to find sex. Avoid pimps, it said; you will probably get robbed. "Better you ring the number of the escort agency, almost all of which can deliver ladies to your hotel room within half hour."
An entrepreneur, identified as "Arab businessman, Zyon Ayni," was opening a new nightclub in Bucharest, offering lap dances, fifty strippers, and "dances in private rooms."
"'I sell fantasies. This is my business,' synthesizes Ayni. If you want to go on a cruise with the company's yacht, accompanied by a very beautiful woman, the company also offers this service. Ayni's company owns 25 yachts but also planes, for those who are seasick."
One club had opened, and "unique at this moment in Romania, on Tuesday night, the international porno star, Quanita Cortez."
As for drinks: "A selection of drinks carefully picked on the taste of the most pretentious clients." At the Harbour Restaurant "you can have reinless fun with all your friends." And the Culmea Veche Restaurant advertised itself as an "above average Romanian restaurant." Don Taco's boast was "The only Mexican restaurant in Bucharest."
They were empty. A few businessmen in Bucharest had money, and what foreigners there were making deals knew that Romanians were ripe for exploitation. The sale of orphans and newborn babies is one of the brisker businesses, followed by the traffic in women for the sex trade. When I rolled my eyes at the dereliction here, Romanians said, "It used to be worse"—they meant the nightmare under Ceausescu. It has been seventeen years since he stood to give a speech in the main square and people began to chant, "Rat! Rat! Rat!"—and he looked cornered and crept away before being captured and shot like a rat.
The Third World stink and disorder were strong in Bucharest, its suburbs looked blighted, its farms muddy and primitive. Romania was another country people were leaving, all of them headed west. The look of Bucharest was desperate and naked, that look which is without shame or self-consciousness: everyone struggling, everyone dressed as though for a hike on a rainy day or dirty job.
No one I spoke to made any money. Nikolai, the university teacher—assistant professor—earned the equivalent of $200 a month. That is exactly what a clerk at a fast-food pizza restaurant told me he earned. His name was Pawel and his English was better than Nikolai's. Neither man had been out of the country. The average national wage was $100 a month. No wonder that Romania, like Albania, is furnishing western Europe with factory workers, hookers, and car thieves. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 10 | "Mister Pawel" —it was Nikolai, hailing me on the platform. He introduced me to the people seeing him off, his university colleagues, threadbare scholars.
"What is your business?" one asked.
"I'm retired," I said.
"Many retired people come here!" he said, being hearty. What did that mean?
"Would you like to be going to Turkey with us?" I said.
"We would rather be going there," one said, and pointed to where the sun, like a coddled egg, was slipping through the sooty sky in the west.
Apart from Nikolai and a big grouchy-looking man with a mustache like a small animal attacking his nose, there was a mother and small daughter—the mother shaking her head and saying "Bulgaristan," because we had to pass through this (she said) unfriendly place. Clearly the route of the Bosfor Express was not popular; I kept noticing that few people wanted to travel east.
Seeing no dining car, I hurried back to the station lobby and bought beer, bottled water, and sandwiches. And then I found my sleeping compartment and watched Bucharest recede from view.
We traveled across the flat plain that is the southeast of Romania, through the immense fields of wheat that, besides orphans, is Romania's only export. The farming villages could have been illustrations from Grimm's Fairy Tales—cottages, huts, outbuildings, barns, all of them aslant, surrounded by fields, no trees, the occasional flock of ducks or turkeys, and the only human a hurrying man who, seeing a cast-off plastic bottle, drank from it—the dregs someone had left—and flung it away when he saw another one, which he snatched and drank from, and tossed to the ground, where he pounced on another and greedily drank. But in a huge homogenized world, this seemed like a novelty, because it was a throwback to a much earlier time: nothing happening except the rain falling on the desperate man and the village in the background, beyond the railway ditch, the witch's house, the woodchopper's hut, the Gray Dwarf's cottage.
Just at dusk the border, Giurgiu Nord: a decayed façade of a station that turned out to have nothing behind it but wasteland, some leafless trees, a snippy immigration official, and a miserable three-legged dog.
Giurgiu is a river town at the edge of the great flat Danubian Plain, which is the southern third of Romania. The Danube River (second only to the Volga in length) has a different name in each country it flows through; it's called the Dunav here. Past a settlement of filthy apartment houses, a garbage dump next to them heaped with plastic bottles and blowing plastic bags, then a truck depot.
The edges of countries are often visual facts. The southern plain of Romania ended at the river, which was the border, but for greater emphasis the other side, the south bank of the Danube, was high ground, a long irregular bluff, which was the edge of Bulgaria, like a castle wall straggling to the horizon east and west. Across the river we went, the flow a hundred yards wide at this point, into Russe, the big river port of Bulgaria—power plant, cranes, chimneys, much bigger and more prosperous than any city I saw in Romania, new tenements as well as grotty ones, buildings in much better condition. Even the railway station was big and solid, unlike the purely symbolic one on the other side of the river in Romania.
One polite and one silly Bulgar examined my passport, and when they left my compartment an old man and three nasty-faced boys leaped into view and rapped on my window, making begging gestures, hand to mouth.
"You don't see this in airports," I said to Nikolai, who stopped by to see if the Bulgars had searched me. He too called it Bulgaristan. He said you'd never find people begging like this in Romania, but I knew for a fact he was wrong.
The border guards hadn't searched me. No one had taken an interest in my bag since I'd entered Romania, and that had been perfunctory, just a sniff-and-sort routine to satisfy a deprived and underpaid border guard. I'd hardly been searched since leaving London and had changed trains five times so far.
The train lost itself in the Bulgarian plateau and the higher ground south of the river, among the hills, where trees were like a sign of wealth, not needed for farmland or fuel, and the stations sheltered little clusters of pale Bulgars, scowling men, mustached old women. And then long sweeping hills, startling, lovely, because I had been expecting more Romanian decrepitude; finally sunset over Veliko Turnovo, and more beer.
I was woken by a sudden knock at two-thirty the next morning. I sprang awake, still half drunk, and a slight but fierce Bulgar woman shone a flashlight in my face.
"Pusspoot."
But that was all there was to the Bulgarian border. In the past, the passports were handled by the conductor, who then demanded a tip at the end of the journey. I didn't mind the interruption; I found it revelatory and vaguely exciting: a fierce foreign woman in a peaked cap and leather coat and boots appearing in the middle of the night at the foot of my bed, insisting that I obey her.
Half an hour later we were at the Turkish border, in a town called Kapikule, the heavy rain lashing the open platform and the glittering lights. The night was cold, and big shrouded Turks marched up and down. Three in the morning and all the officialdom of Kapikule had turned out to greet the train. In spite of the score of policemen and soldiers, only one man was processing the train passengers who were entering the Turkish Republic: he sat in a little lighted window while we stood in the rain. I was last, Nikolai next to last. And now I could see the passengers: Romanians, Bulgars, Turks, big families, children in modest clothes, small Slavic boys no more than ten with mustaches as visible as those of their grannies, beetle-browed men—no tourists. With the driving rain, the old train, the intimidating border guards, and the shadowy town behind the prison-like station, it could have been forty years ago, all of us squeezing into the far edge of Turkey like refugees, soaking wet.
Nikolai said, "Is not modern!"
"Why are you going to Istanbul?"
"Attending conference on European enlargement. I am reading paper."
"Romania's being allowed to join, right?"
"Will join in January 2007."
"But not Turkey?"
"Turkey is problem. Human rights." He shrugged, rain pouring down his face.
"Romanian human rights are better?"
"Improving now, because we want to join EU."
"America is capturing people in places like Tanzania and Albania and sending them to Romania for interrogation."
"Who tell you this?"
"It's called extraordinary rendition. They can be tortured in Romania."
"We are friendly with America now. Also with Britain. We have U.S. military bases. Romanians are against the war in Iraq, but we like Americans."
"What is Romania's main industry?"
"Agriculture."
"Nikolai, agriculture isn't an industry."
"We have much wheat and maize." He thought a moment, then said, "Ceausescu ruined the country. He destroyed it and tried to rebuild it. He put up ridiculous buildings."
"I saw the Palace of Congresses."
"Ha! A monster! His daughter wants his body to be dug up so they can identify him. It's not him, she says."
"Do you remember when he fell?"
"I was seven in '89 when he was overthrown, but I remember the excitement. My grandparents lived with us. They were so happy. They always said, 'The Americans will come.' Meaning—will save us. They said it after the war. My parents said it. They said it in the 1950s. During Ceausescu. 'The Americans will come.' After Ceausescu. 'The Americans will come.' We hated our government. We wanted to be saved."
"How do you know this?"
"One of my projects is oral history. I interviewed many people, not just my relatives but people from all over Romania. One man was in solitary confinement for seventeen years, for a petty offense. Another man I spoke to was walking down a street in Bucharest. He was carrying a French book—literature, maybe Flaubert. The police stopped him. They seized the book and they framed it as 'antisocial.' He got a year in prison—this was in the 1980s!"
"Weren't people angry, being treated like this?"
"They said, 'The Americans will come. They will save our soul.'"
"Has it happened?"
"We have a right-wing government. It is opportunistic. We have U.S. military bases, and the people approve it. We have seen worse, much worse."
Eventually we got to the window. I bought a Turkish visa for $20 and we had our passports stamped. Then, completely wet and very cold, I re-boarded the train and went to sleep. It was then around four-thirty, and by the time I woke, dawn had broken and we were passing the Sea of Marmara, muddy fields on one side, ships beyond the tracks, the big bold city of domes and minarets in the distance.
Nikolai had crept out of his compartment, his face pressed to the window. He had never been to Turkey before; he had never been out of Romania. He looked alarmed.
"What do you think?"
"More modern than I thought."
He was dazzled and swallowing hard, for it was not just the enormous mosques and churches that were impressive but the density of the building in these southwestern suburbs of Istanbul. I was impressed too, as much by the extent of the new construction as by its modernity. It made Romania seem the muddiest Third World backwater.
I said, "Isn't it unfair that Turkey can't join the EU for another ten years or more?"
Nikolai said, "They have problems with human rights of the Kurds and the Armenians."
"The Kurds want to secede and start their own country, which is a little unreasonable. And the Armenian business was a hundred years ago. Look at this city—imagine the power of this economy."
"But in the countryside is different. Poor people," Nikolai said, thinking of the poverty in rural Romania.
"You've seen them?"
"No."
"What about the Gypsies in Romania?"
"Is a problem. How integrating? We don't know. Some live in tents. We call zidane" he said, using the Russian word for the people, called Rom or Romany all over Europe.
"What's the biggest problem in Romania?"
"Maybe Gypsies. Maybe poverty."
"What's the cost of living?"
"Is the same as Toronto. My uncle lives there."
He was appalled by what he was seeing, Istanbul rising all around us, the train screeching past the old city wall and new tenements. We were racing towards Seraglio Point and the sight of the Bosporus—Asia looming on the far side.
Nikolai was speechless. It was obvious that he had prepared himself for a shabby Asiatic city of oppression and torture, crumbly mosques and fez-wearing Turks and backward-looking Muslims. Instead he was greeted by a grand and reimagined city of laughing children and beautiful women and swaggering men which had been ignored by Europe and sneered at by the Islamic republics. It was a city of ancient gilt and impressive modernization. He could see that the old city had been preserved—we were passing through it, approaching Sirkeci Station in the old-fashioned but carefully preserved quarter of Sultanahmet; and beyond the Golden Horn were the bluffs of Beyoglu and the tooting ferries to the Asian side, which was lined with magnificent sea-front houses, the villas they called yalis, and the rain still coming down hard. Nikolai shriveled into a country mouse and, with his forehead pressed against the train window, looked as though he were going to weep with frustration. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | The ferry to Besiktas | Istanbul is a water world, and your first view of it, stepping out of Sirkeci Station, is the pin-cushion profile of minarets on domes seeming to rise from steep dark islands, turbulent ocean all around, the Sea of Marmara to the right, the Golden Horn to the left, the Bosporus straight ahead. Walk forward, walk anywhere, and you approach water splashing at the shores of the city, which is spread across three distinct promontories. Across the Sea of Marmara, dappled with raindrops this afternoon—past the ferries and cargo ships and fishing boats, those silhouettes of battlements and villas—is the shore of Asia, the twinkling edge of the Eastern Star.
To the southeast is Haydarpasa Station, looking like a dark waterside cathedral. Thirty-three years before, I had boarded an express to Ankara and Lake Van. Changing trains, taking buses, I had traveled overland to Iran and India and beyond. Things were different now: the Iranians had turned down my visa application, and war had brought anarchy to Afghanistan. I would take another route this time, head through Turkey and then hope to detour around Iran by changing trains in Georgia and rolling onward, through the Stans: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan—places that had been forbidden to me all those years ago—and into India.
After three night trains I needed a breather in Istanbul. A short walk from Sirkeci Station was the ferry terminal. I took the ferry to the landing stage at Besiktas and strolled to the Ciragan Palas. This hotel was part of an old and elegant Ottoman palace, and was as welcome a hotel as the Pera Palas had been in the past. It was expensive, but it was at the edge of the Bosporus and easy to get to, a 20-cent ride on the ferry.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Istanbul ferries "were such a part of everyday life that they assumed an almost totemic importance." The ferries dip and roll; the best way of admiring the vast, separated city is from the rail of a boat. "The ferries' great gift to the skyline is the smoke from their chimneys."
The words are those of Orhan Pamuk, the distinguished novelist and Istanbullu—he seldom left the city of his birth and said he had never been tempted to live elsewhere. Thirty-three years before, I had happened to meet Yashar Kemal, the novelist and political tub-thumper. He was still alive at the age of eighty-two, but was out of town. I decided to go in search of Pamuk and to see what the decades had done to Istanbul. For Pamuk, it is a city of joy and also of "overwhelming melancholy," and yet the Bosporus is "the font of our good health, the cure of our ills, the infinite source of our goodness and goodwill that sustains the city and all those who dwell in it."
In his unusual chronicle of his life in the city, Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk describes his childhood, his fractious family, his chronic ennui, his self-imposed solitude, his daydreams, his love of the side streets and the ships and the preoccupations that are peculiar to Istanbul. This is one of my favorite city books because it is written by a native son, a keen observer who knows all his city's faults as well as its virtues. It is right that it is also a family memoir, because his relationship with Istanbul is familial, the city like an uneasy relative, a funny uncle or an eccentric granny who provides him shelter. Such a book might be written by a New Yorker or a Parisian, but it would not be so persuasive, because New York is a modern city with a thin substratum and Paris is an artifact if not a confection. And a Turk is someone with deep roots, not a mere urbanite or transplant. For a Turk, Istanbul is an extension of Turkish culture and the Turkish personality, reflecting its conflicts, obsessions, and character traits. Its complex and glorious history is evident in many of its buildings, glimpses of Byzantium and Constantinople above the heavy traffic and the teenyboppers on cell phones.
Istanbul is ancient, and Istanbullus carry its old-fangledness in their heads—Pamuk is the proof of that. What do you think of us? the Turks often ask of strangers. New Yorkers and Parisians never ask such things, nor do Londoners, who take the view that strangers are the ones to be assessed or mocked, certainly not themselves. In most cities, the inhabitants are too busy and hard-pressed to care. But Turks are different, self-conscious of their longitude on the map, straddling Europe and Asia.
"To some degree, we all worry about what foreigners and strangers think of us," Pamuk says. "My interest in how my city looks to western eyes is—as for most Istanbullus—very troubled; like all other Istanbul writers with one eye on the West, I sometimes suffer in confusion."
"To see Istanbul through the eyes of a foreigner always gives me pleasure," Pamuk goes on. Flaubert, Gide, Nerval, Knut Hamsun, and Hans Christian Andersen all visited Istanbul and recorded their impressions, and in most instances what they saw was a fading Orientalism that ceased to exist as soon as it was described—the harem, the grotesque and the picturesque, dervishes, hubble-bubble pipes, the slave market, Ottoman clothing, floppy sleeves, Arabic calligraphy, and, he says, the hamals, the porters, though such men can still be seen, heavily burdened with huge loads on wooden pack frames, trudging up and down the cobbled streets of the old city. Whenever I began to generalize about Istanbul's modernism, I encountered an exotic vignette—a shroud, a fez, a minaret, a veil, a donkey, or someone grilling fish over coals by the roadside.
But Pamuk's book, like all passionate books, is a bewitchment. Once you've read his Istanbul, you have been persuaded to see the city with his eyes—a gloomy, smoky warren of narrow lanes and conflicted families, serene, half fictional, like a city in a dream.
I find most cities nasty, but I can see that Istanbul is habitable, a city with the soul of a village. Unless there is a bomb in the bazaar, or a Kurd-related outrage, there is never news of Istanbul in the Western press. To say it is beautiful is so obvious as to be frivolous, yet the sight of its mosques and churches can be almost heart-stopping. I am impervious to its charm, even the word "charm," but I admire Istanbul for its look of everlastingness, as though it has always existed (it has been a noble city since its first incarnation as Byzantium 1,700 years ago, and looks it in part). Most of all I like the city for its completeness and its self-sufficiency: it is a finished work, distinctly itself. Of course, you can buy gold and carpets in the Grand Bazaar, or jewelry and leather goods in the Egyptian bazaar, but everything else is available throughout the city too, because Turkey makes everything—stationery, cheap clothes, computers, knives, cigarettes, refrigerators, furniture. Heavy industry flourishes. The newspaper business is lively and competitive, book publishing is energetic, Turkish literacy is high, and book sales are brisk.
Given the fact that Turkey shares borders with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Arme nia, and Georgia, as well as Greece and Bulgaria, it could be a cockpit, yet it is a generally calm and self-assured place.
Istanbul now was vastly more prosperous in the look of its spruced-up buildings and well-dressed inhabitants. The ferry to Besiktas was proof of that, with its Sunday-serene passengers: little families holding hands, groups of muttering boys, smiling girls with their eyes downcast for modesty's sake, elderly women in shawls, bearded mullahs, shrouded wives in black burqas, every gradation in the chairs and pews of the ferry, from defiant unbeliever to scrupulous Koran reader.
The city is dramatic in its vistas, its spaces, its mixed population, and for appearing to accommodate everyone, but it is too big and sprawling to be definable. Yet because it is whole and coherent, self-sufficient, with an impressive profile of domes and spires, it is an easy city to visit, allowing the traveler to be presumptuous. The formalities of Turkish life, the elaborate courtesies of the Turkish language, encourage politeness.
The massacre of Armenians a century ago, the later expulsion of Greeks, and the Kurdish outrages and Turkish reprisals are lamentable facts of Turkish history; still, no city in Asia is so self-consciously reform-minded. And it is lucky in its writers, who are public intellectuals in the European mode—Orhan Pamuk was one of many who denounced the downplaying of the Armenian slaughter. He represented a public conscience. Yashar Kemal had played that role, as had his near namesake Yaya Kemal. All such people—public speakers, makers of statements, sometime journalists, polemicists with their passion and daring—were almost unknown in the countries I'd just passed through: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. A young woman novelist, Elif Shafak, was also outspoken against excessive Turkification and in defense of Sufism. Many of the writers were in hot water when I arrived, but they seemed (as Turkish writers frequently do) to regard hot water as their natural element.
That it is one of the most easily negotiated and hospitable cities in the world makes me a mild Turkophile. Although it's a frustrating city to drive in (the traffic moves at a crawl), it is full of alternatives—a metro, commuter trains, buses, dolmuses (minivans)—and it is one of the great cities for walking or taking a ferry from embankment to embankment. I had been too young and hurried to appreciate its virtues on my first visit. For one thing, Istanbul is a well-used city: its marvels are not mere artifacts and museum pieces. They are part of everyday life. The ancient mosques and churches, the bazaars, the bridges, the gardens, the promenades, the fish markets, and the fruit stalls are busily patronized by Turks. Being a secular country, Turkey thrives on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer and rest, and the bazaars and shops are closed on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath.
Istanbul had an air of Sunday serenity and an off-season slackness. Worry beads were not in evidence. It was only the next day in the empty bazaars that the hawkers were frowning, but when I remarked on the lack of customers, they said, "The tourists will come next month, Inshallah"
I was aware of being a solitary traveler on a long journey. With no detailed onward plans, I was not looking much beyond Turkey at the moment. The newspaper headlines were all about the Iraq War—it was a one-day bus trip to the Iraq border. The war was clearly unpopular, but no one singled me out or harassed me. On the contrary, I was welcomed in restaurants, and I delighted in the food: stuffed grape leaves, bluefish, cheese dumplings, and an eggplant dish so delicious its name is a catchphrase, imam bayildi, "the imam fainted."
In the rain and the raw March wind off the Bosporus, the streets were uncrowded. I walked from mosque to mosque, then made some calls, agreeing to give a talk at a local college, as I had done on my first visit. I was invited to a dinner party and asked if there was anyone I wished to meet.
"What about Orhan Pamuk?"
"He usually says no."
The next day I gave my talk, at Bogazçi University, a former missionary college on the heights of Bebek, and this being hospitable Turkey, I was guest of honor at a lunch where all the other diners were women. One was an American who was writing a book on all the writers who had lived and written about Istanbul, among them Mark Twain, James Baldwin, Paul Bowles, and a man I bumped into after lunch, John Freely, a New Yorker who has lived and worked here for thirty-five years, the author of many books on Istanbul subjects.
Since working women in male-dominated societies are often more forthright and funnier than women in more liberated places, this campus lunch was lively and pleasant. Afterwards, I spoke to an English literature class on the subject of time and travel, alluding not just to my return journey but (because the class was studying the Romantic movement) also to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."
They were attentive students of the sort that used to exist on American campuses—modest, studious, intense, omnivorous readers, quoters of Byron, admirers of Shelley, note takers, listeners, not intimidated by esoteric Romanticism. They happened to be reading Northanger Abbey—a copy on each desk. They were aware that because they were Turks studying English classics they had to try harder; they had something to prove. And they easily understood what I was saying about my return trip to Turkey and my memories of my long-ago journey, because they got the drift of "Tintern Abbey," where it was and what it stood for:
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet...
Though they hadn't been born when I was last here, these students, because of their learning, could relate to my sentimental journey: we had Wordsworth in common.
From the class on Romanticism, I went to look at the hotel I'd stayed in my first time, the Pera Palas. The building that had once seemed glamorous to me now looked elderly and neglected, and after one drink in the bar I left it and walked along the drizzly boulevards towards Taksim Square.
One of the compelling features of Istanbul is that minutes from a palace or the holiest mosque or the most respectable neighborhood are their opposites—the dive, the hovel, the lower depths. The density of the city allows this proximity. The big-city conceit of the snob is the notion that sleaze is elsewhere, but it is usually only a few streets away.
So there I was, after leaving the Pera Palas, in the twinkling of an eye, in a dingy downstairs bar, the Club Saray, among mostly empty tables, greeting Marjana, who had just joined me.
"You buy me drink?"
"Of course."
She was thin, blond, starved-looking, and sullen. She might have been ill, but what struck me about her was that of all the girls in the bar, dimly lit though it was, she was reading a magazine. Though she had just folded it into her bag, I could see that it was not Turkish but Russian. She had been so engrossed in it, she was the one woman who had not looked up when I'd entered. What was a Russian woman doing here?
"What are you reading?"
That was when she'd put it away. She smiled, and after she'd sat down she said, "Pop stars. Music. Money."
"You're Russian?"
"I live Ukraine"—but it might have been "leave."
"Kiev?"
"No Kiev. Small village." She was sipping a glass of raki.
"Nice place?"
"Not nice. Small!" She shook her head, struggling for words. "No life. No money."
"Chickens?"
"Da. Chickens!"
"You come to Istanbul to make money?"
"You have money?" She was thin, with delicate hands and a hungry mouth, and she said "money" like a famished person using a word for food.
"Plenty," I said, and made the money sign with my fingers.
"So buy me another drink."
"You didn't finish this one."
I knew the routine. The conventional view is that these women are idle sauntering floozies, killing time over a drink, lollygagging the day away on a bar stool. No, they are strict and even terrifying timekeepers, especially when they have a pimp to answer to. And it's odd, because "Hurry up," which is their mantra, is not an aphrodisiac and hardly an endearment.
The meter was running. Time is everything to a prostitute. As clock watchers they are keener than lawyers, though the term "solicitor" applies to both, and they share the concept of billable hours, every minute needing to be accounted for in these foot-tapping, finger-drumming professions.
The prostitute also shares the lawyer's fake sympathy, the apparent concern for your welfare, the initial buttonholing how-can-I-help-you? clucking, the pretense of help that is a way of ensnaring you and making you pay. In both cases, as long as you go on paying you have their full attention, but they are always in charge.
Marjana, I could tell by her sideways glances, was getting signals from a Turkish man, probably her pimp, his heels locked onto the rungs of a chair as he rocked back with a drink in his hand.
"So we go?"
"Where?"
"Not far. Near this place. I like you." The second drink was set down. "I think you are strong man. You are from what country?"
"America."
"Big country. Lots of money. I want to go to America."
"How did you get here, to Turkey?"
"My friend tell me I can make money here. She say, 'Work in café.' Good work." Marjana looked a bit rueful, pursing her lips as she sloshed the raki in her mouth, then swallowed.
"You came—how? Bus? Plane?"
"I fly in plane. Is little money."
"Who's your boss? Ukrainian man?"
"Turk man." She glanced to the side, where the man was still glowering, and she pressed her lips together. Then, with a toss of her head, "We go?"
"Let's talk."
"Talk, talk," she said, irritated and impatient. She leaned over and tapped my knee. "What about fuck?"
I palmed some Turkish lire and put the notes into her hand, a gesture that shut her up but did not calm her. She looked at me as though I might be weird, but the money was in the meter.
"You have family?" I asked. She nodded. "Husband?" She nodded, but more slowly. "Children?"
At first she simply stared; then she began to cry, pressing her knuckles against her eyes. She shook her head and looked miserable. I hung my head, and when I saw her shoes—high heels, scuffed and twisted and damp from the wet streets of Taksim—I felt miserable myself at the sight of her tormented toes.
A hard-faced woman loomed over her and began to mutter. She was plump, in a tight dress, and her potbelly was at the level of my eyes. I recognized the word prablyema. Marjana was still sniffling in sorrow.
"What you say to Marjana?" the woman demanded.
"Nothing," I said lamely.
"She cry," the woman said.
Marjana tried to wave the woman away.
"I didn't do anything," I said, and sounded like a ten-year-old. But I had made her remember her small children.
The woman muttered again to Marjana. Tears, recrimination, defiance, accusation, more tears—this was as far from sex as it was possible to be. And at the periphery was a suggestion of violence in the smoldering gaze and threatening posture of the Turkish man.
The woman flicked her fat hand at me, grazing my face with her big fingernails. Though they were plastic glue-ons, they were sharp and claw-like, and could have served as weapons.
"Maybe you go, eh?"
Gladly, I thought. I stood up and backed away, a bit too quickly, but happy to go, saying goodbye. I had guessed that Marjana was one of many women lured to Istanbul and kept against her will—with a family elsewhere, unable to help her. I had wanted to talk, but in such circumstances, in most circumstances, talk is trouble. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 12 | I got more news of the dinner party: "Pamuk said he's coming." I was eager to meet him, not merely because of his well-made novels and his personal history in Istanbul, but because, as a passionate writer and self-described graphomaniac, he was probably eccentric, someone who lived at the edge of the world, the solitary soul that all writers must be in order to do their work and live their lives. Writers are always readers, and though they are usually unbalanced, they are always noticers of the world. From an early age I have not been able to rid myself of the notion that the best writers are deeply flawed heroes.
Among the Turkish guests at the party, some of whom were writers, all of whom were polite, patient, and deferential, Pamuk was restless. Rather gangly and bespectacled, he thrashed around as he spoke. He reminded me of someone I knew. He was a taunter, hunching his shoulders, throwing his head back to laugh—and he had a loud, appreciative guffaw. He pulled faces, often clownish ones that his scholar's eyeglasses exaggerated. He was both a mocker and a self-mocker, a buttonholer, a finger wagger, and his consistent mode of inquiry was teasing. He was a needler, a joker, not a speechifier but a maker of deflating remarks in a smiling and mildly prosecutorial way, like a courtroom wit.
I smiled when it dawned on me that he reminded me of myself—evasive, goofy, slightly moody, ill at ease in a crowd, uncomfortable at formal occasions. Latins look a lot like Turks: I felt he physically resembled me, and he had my oblique habit of affecting to be ignorant and a bit gauche in order to elicit information.
"What do you mean by that?" was his frequent question, demanding that you explain what you just said.
His mother loomed large in his life and in his Istanbul narrative. I asked him what she thought of the book.
"She didn't like my Istanbul book. Then I got a divorce." He smiled. "She wasn't happy about that. But I put her in a book—My Name Is Red. Then she was happy."
"I put my mother in a book and she was very unhappy," I said. "She saw it as a betrayal. When my first book was published, almost forty years ago, she wrote me a long letter. I was in Africa at the time. She said the book was a piece of trash. That was her exact word. Trash! 'Thanks, Mom!'"
Pamuk became interested. "You must have been sad about that."
"Strangely, no. I was energized. I think I would have been disturbed if she'd praised the book—I would have suspected her of lying. I thought: I'm not writing to please her. By the way, I kept the letter. I still have it. It was a goad to me."
We were at the dinner table, being served a Turkish meal. While listening attentively to me, Pamuk was absorbing the reactions of the other people, his eyes darting.
"Why did you make a face?" he said to the woman next to me.
She denied she had made a face.
"Was it because we were talking about mothers, and you are a mother?"
"Of course not."
"You did this," Pamuk said, and squinted and showed his teeth and compressed his face into a comic mask.
He spoke about his years as a student, studying English, reading English books, and how as an anonymous Turk with a fluency in English he had taken Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter around Istanbul, pointing out the sights, explaining the history.
"I showed them the city. I was the translator. I was next to them, helping, listening. They had no idea who I was, but they were great writers to me."
Talk of Arthur Miller turned to talk of Marilyn Monroe. I said that I had written an essay about the Sotheby auction of Marilyn's personal effects.
"Expensive things?" Pamuk asked.
"Everything—dresses, books, shoes, broken mirrors, her capri pants, a copy of The Joy of Cooking with her scribbles in it, her wobbly dressing table, her junk jewelry. She had a yellow pad of paper and, in her writing, the words 'He doesn't love me.' A cigarette lighter that Frank Sinatra had given her. Also her 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President' dress. And her toaster."
Pamuk was delighted by the inventory. He said, "I love catalogues of people's lives. Did you see the auction of Jackie Kennedy's possessions?"
"Yes, but no toasters in that one."
He said he loved minutiae, the revelation in everyday objects. Not the treasures but the yard-sale items, always more telling. It was a novelist's passion, a need to know secrets, to intrude—without seeming to—on other people's lives.
Still eating, he sized me up and said, "You went swimming with Yashar Kemal."
"That's right—thirty-three years ago."
"He is away, in south Anatolia," the host said, because I had also asked how I might get in touch with him. "He is sorry to miss you. He remembered you from that time long ago."
It seemed to me amazing that he was alive and writing, at the age of eighty-two, this man who'd boasted of his Gypsy blood and his upbringing in the wild hinterland of Turkey among bandits and peasants. He had been inspired by Faulkner, another writer who boasted of being a rustic. But Pamuk was a metropolitan, a man on the frontier as all writers are, but essentially a city dweller.
"I read your book about South America," Pamuk said. "I liked the part about Argentina, especially Borges."
Pamuk had much in common with Borges, not just his writing but his personality—an inwardness, a gift for the magical in his prose, wide and even arcane learning combined with a sense of comedy. Borges had been very funny in conversation, and often self-mocking, pretending to jeer at his own writing, insincerely remarking on how short his stories were—"and probably full of howlers!" as he said to me of "The Wall and the Books," his Chinese story.
The most endearing trait that Pamuk and Borges shared was a passion for the cities of their birth. Throughout Borges's writing is a nuanced history of Buenos Aires, and Borges would have nodded in agreement at Pamuk's judgment of a life in Istanbul, because it was so similar to that of a Buenos Aires person, a porteño: "When Istanbullus grow a bit older and feel their fates intertwining with that of the city, they come to welcome the cloak of melancholy that brings their lives a contentment, an emotional depth, that almost looks like happiness. Until then they rage against their fate."
In his writing, Borges extolled the violence, the music, the steamy secrets of Buenos Aires while at the same time bemoaning its philistinisms and pomposities and backward-looking conceits. Pamuk, it seemed to me, was no different.
"You read to him," Pamuk said. "That was nice."
"He enjoyed being read to. He had a little glimmer of eyesight—I mean, he signed a book for me—but he couldn't read."
"Did he do this?" Pamuk shut his eyes and threw his head back in an imitation of Stevie Wonder lost in a rapture of appreciation, grinning and shaking his head. It was a sudden and unexpected turn. Everyone laughed.
"You're wicked," I said.
"What do you mean by that?"
I said, "He didn't wag his head. He sat there and often finished the sentences in the stories. He seemed to know most of them by heart."
"Which stories? What did you read?"
"Kipling. He liked Plain Tales from the Hills. 'The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows'—about opium smoking. 'Beyond the Pale'—a doomed love affair. Borges was a connoisseur of unrequited love."
"What else?"
"Parts of the Arabian Nights in the Burton translation. He owned a first edition, about twenty volumes."
"Some of it is sexy. You read him those parts too, eh?"
Querying, mocking, needling, teasing, then all at once attentive. Pamuk approached a subject like a city dweller, darting up this alley and down that street, and then he was at an upstairs window calling down, raising a laugh, before his confrontation with a direct question. He also had a writer's gift for risking the sort of overfrank childish questions that can be disarming.
Talk of Borges and love led him to speak candidly about his father's mysterious other life and the loud battles between his father and mother: the turbulent household—evasive husband, agitated wife.
A woman sitting next to Pamuk said, "My mother once bumped into my father when he was with his mistress."
"That's a nightmare," I said.
"Good answer!" Pamuk said, smirking at me.
His indirection, the manner of his teasing, his posturing and prodding, finishing with a trenchant remark, was proof of Pamuk's seriousness. I thought of how all writers, when they are alone, talk to themselves. "When the inner history of any writer's mind is written," V. S. Pritchett once said, "we find (I believe) that there is a break at some point in his life. At some point he splits off from the people who surround him and he discovers the necessity of talking to himself and not to them."
In Istanbul it is possible to observe this process taking place in Pamuk's restless mind, his discovering that his inner life is unknown to his family, his relief in talking to himself. He finds solace away from his family, in solitary walks and mumbling meditation, because, among others things—as a portrait of a city, about growing up in a conflicted family, the joy of reading, famous visitors, a love of solitude, the melancholy of an ancient place—the book is about how he abandoned all other ambitions to become a writer, or more than a writer.
He was in the news. This reclusive man seemed an unlikely hero, but a few months earlier he had been in court as the defendant in one of those national trials that is like a morality play, a lion being judged by donkeys. Around that time he wrote in The New Yorker, "Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, its saints, and policemen at every opportunity, but refuses to honor its writers until they have spent years in courts and prisons, I cannot say that I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last 'a real Turkish writer.'"
Outsiders complain that Turkey is repressive. Turks complain too. Every shade of Islamic opinion is present in Turkish society, ranging from the most benign to the most fanatical, and every shade of secular opin ion as well. This, I think, is the reason every visitor to Turkey finds something to like in the country and always finds a Turk to agree with.
The odd but probably provable fact is that repression often has a salutary effect on writers, strengthening them by challenging them, making them resist, making their voices important, for at their best, writers are rebellious, and repression is the whetstone that keeps them sharp, even if the repression makes their lives miserable. A free country cannot guarantee great writing, and a public intellectual (albeit a reluctant one) like Pamuk hardly exists in Britain and the United States.
Pamuk's crime was his mentioning to a Swiss journalist that "a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds were killed in this country and I'm the only one who dares to talk about it." This remark resulted in death threats, newspaper attacks, vilification, and a criminal charge of insulting the state. At his trial Pamuk faced a possible three-year sentence if he was found guilty, but the case was dropped. He was set free. He'd made his bones as a Turkish writer and he disappeared—Istanbul has that big-city quality of being a place in which you can vanish without a trace.
Pamuk does agree to be interviewed now and then. His voice is distinctive, his manner inimitable. Here is his response to a woman from a British paper badgering him on the subject of free speech in Turkey: "Look," he said to her, "I never had any trouble writing novels. I talked about this with my publisher when we were publishing Snow, which was my own explicitly political novel—but then nothing happened to it. The only time I had trouble, I had trouble because of interviews, madam." Then he waggled his finger at the woman and laughed.
He was waggling his finger now, at this dinner party, indicating one person, then another. "What do you mean by that?" "Why are you smiling?" "I find that ridiculous"
"How did you get to Turkey?" he asked me. "Someone said, what, you took a train?"
"Train from London. Well, four of them. Via Romania."
When Pamuk made a face he looked years younger, indeed like a disgusted child, his glasses shifting on his wrinkled nose.
"I was in Romania," he said. "A writers' conference, but on a boat—a sort of cruise. A whole week just sailing around with other writers."
"It sounds awful."
"Good answer!"
He smiled at the news that I had glided in from Bulgaria, through the boondocks of Turkey, habituating myself, and was planning to glide east again in a few days, to Ankara and Trabzon and Hopa to Georgia.
He said, "I have read your book about Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow"
"What do you think?"
"A very affectionate book."
"That's true, but not many people saw it."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. Maybe quarrels are more interesting. People said it was cruel. I'd say unsparing. The quarrelsome part of it was played up as a writers' feud. But Naipaul was an important figure in my writing life."
"How can we know what he thought of the book."
"No way of telling. He's not talking."
"I can't believe he didn't read it."
"I don't think he did. His wife did, though, I'm sure of that."
"The wife was part of your problem," Pamuk said. "Second wife, yes?"
"Right"
Pamuk leaned over and looked across the top of his glasses and said, "Am I a good reader of Paul Theroux?"
"Very astute."
"And wasn't there another woman?"
"Naipaul's mistress of twenty-three years. He ditched her after his wife died and married a woman he had just met in Pakistan. It's a strange tale."
"Maybe not so strange," Pamuk said.
We talked about writers' lovers and pieced together the odd love life of Graham Greene, who remained married to a woman he had not cohabited with for sixty years or more, while chasing women and suffering through three or four grand passions, all of them with married women. His last affair was like a marriage. The woman visited him at his apartment every noontime and prepared his lunch, after which they made love. Then they had a drink, and at nightfall the woman returned home to her husband. This went on for years. The husband knew about it, but his wife said something like "Don't make me choose."
Pamuk said, "It sounds perfect."
"After Greene died, the woman divorced her husband."
"Ah." Pamuk looked happy, contemplating the complexity of this.
Over dessert, the other guests who were writers talked about the bur den of being a Turkish writer abroad. Westerners whose knowledge of Turkey was limited to Midnight Express and döner kebabs would challenge them, saying, What about the Armenians? What about the Kurds? How come you torture people?
A writer named Yusof said that he had been an admirer of the Anglophile critic George Steiner.
"I was in London," Yusof said. "I had five books I wanted George Steiner to sign. I went to one of his lectures, and afterwards he took a seat at a table to sign people's books. He signed two of mine and said, 'Where do you come from?' I told him Turkey. He pushed the rest of my books away—he wouldn't sign them. He said, 'Go home and take care of your people.' He meant the Kurds."
On my way back to the hotel, it occurred to me that though the United States had supported the Kurds, tolerating Kurdish terrorism in both Turkey and Iraq, and were still fighting a war in Iraq, no Turk had blamed me for this slaughter, or even raised the matter with me. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 13 | The other writer I had wished to meet in Istanbul was Elif Shafak. We met at the Ciragan Palas, on another rainy day. She was so beautiful I forgot her books, writing seemed irrelevant, I was bewitched. I was reminded of the Kipling line "Much that is written about Oriental passion and impulsiveness is exaggerated and compiled at second-hand, but a little of it is true," and Elif Shafak seemed the embodiment of it. She was about thirty, with gray-blue eyes and the face of a brilliant child, which is also the pedomorphic face of a Renaissance Madonna, framed by wisps of light hair. All over her hands and fingers were thin silver chains, looped and dangling, attached to a mass of silver rings, as though she'd just escaped from a harem.
I found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying, so distracted was I by her loveliness. But her passion and impulsiveness were unmistakable, and I reminded myself that she had written five highly praised novels.
Unlike most other Turkish writers, she was cosmopolitan. She had either taught or studied, or both, in universities in Michigan and Arizona and at Mount Holyoke. Her mother had been a Turkish diplomat, so she had lived in many capital cities. Her father had vanished from her life; she was aware of his being present in Istanbul but never saw him. This absent father was the subject of her new novel, Baba and the Bastard, which was kept hidden in many Istanbul bookstores because of its racy title.
"Shafak" was an invented surname, the word meaning aurora or dawn in Turkish. The name suited her, since she glowed with life, and dawn in Asia does not come by degrees, the sky slowly lightening, but is like something switched on, filling the new day with a sudden brightness that seems complete. Elif Shafak had that radiance.
She was also unexpectedly combative—you don't expect such fight in a beauty, but it was attractive as, jingling the chains and silver filigree on her hands, she denounced various Turkish attitudes.
"Turkey has amnesia," she said. "Turks are indifferent to the past, to old words, to old customs."
"I thought that Turkish reformers were generally a good thing."
"No, they erased a lot that we need to know," she said. "The Kemalists and the reformers changed the culture. They threw away old words, they got rid of foreign words. But these words are part of who we are. We need to know them."
I was transfixed by her eyes, by her slender fingers, a silver chain swinging from a ring on each finger.
"We need to know about the Armenians," she said.
"You say these things in public?" I asked.
"Yes, though it's hard, especially for a woman here."
"I'm interested that you have public intellectuals, speaking their mind. Most countries don't have them."
"We have many. We fight and disagree all the time."
"How do you get on in the United States?"
"I like it, but I had to start all over there. I am someone here. There, I am no one."
She talked about her studies in Sufi literature and culture, not the dervishes of Istanbul but the cults and practitioners in remotest Turkey. I offered her my memory of Sufis dancing at sunset at a mosque in Omdurman, in Sudan, one of the most dramatic encounters I'd had on my Dark Star Safari through Africa. Mine had been a happy accident, hers were both vivid and cerebral; Sufism was a study for her. I was nonetheless distracted—her beauty was like a curse that prevented me from understanding the nuances of what she was saying. Still, I felt that meeting Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, I was looking at the future of Turkish literature.*
* Later that year, Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in literature.
In a casual conversation with a Turkish scholar I mentioned how impressed I was with the work of writers like Pamuk and Shafak. And there were many others who'd not been translated. How to explain this literary excellence?
"Nomadism," he said. "The storytelling tradition is strong in Turkey because of our seasonal migrations. Iran has been settled for twenty-five hundred years. Greece is sedentary. But Turkish society has a dynamic structure. Because of this constant movement we became storytellers."
All that remained, before I took the night express to Ankara, was a visit to the dentist. I had a loose filling, and fearing that the discomfort would only get worse over the next weeks or months, I asked for a recommendation.
That was how I came to be sitting, canted back in a chair, being examined by Dr. Isil Evcimik, who was a pleasant woman in her late forties with a reassuringly well-equipped office. Cuddly toys dangled nearby, to cheer up anxious children. They cheered me up too, and when Dr. Evcimik told me that her daughter was at Princeton, on a full scholarship, I felt I was in good hands.
It seemed part of Dr. Evcimik's technique to murmur a running commentary on what she happened to be doing at any given time. With a hypodermic syringe in one hand and a swab in the other she said, "I will first swab"—and she swabbed my gums—"and then we wait a little." We waited a little. "Then I put the needle in very slowly. Please tell me if it hurts." It didn't. "Good. Now we wait a little more."
Was the tooth cold- or heat-sensitive? she wondered.
I didn't know, but it was sensitive.
"Can be either. Can be both. But better if it's one or the other."
She explained reversible sensitivity. That could happen to me. Or there was irreversible sensitivity. "In that case, you might need a root canal. Where are you going to next?"
"Georgia. Azerbaijan."
"A root canal in Azerbaijan? I don't think so." She selected a drill, saying, "Now I will drill amalgam." She drilled the loose cement out of the tooth and said, "This is amalgam." She sprayed the tooth, she drilled some more. She then mixed a substance on a dish. "This is composite. This will taste very bad. Please don't swallow any—it's not poison, though."
I sat, mouth agape, listening.
"Now I will fill." She tamped the composite into the hole. "This"—with a flourish of a tool—"is a bonding agent. We will apply. And then"—a flash of silver—"a collar. Like a belt around the tooth, so you can floss." More manipulation. "Not done yet. It's high. I will smooth it." She did so. "Please bite on this." I did so twice. "How is it?"
"Better."
"I don't like 'better.'"
She buzzed it some more, she perfected it, she told me that she had always wanted to visit Hawaii, and to this end she gave me her bill, a bargain at the Turkish equivalent of $153.
When I told Dr. Evcimik I was taking the train that night to Ankara, she said, "That's the best way to go. The plane is expensive and lots of trouble. The airport is far and there are always delays. When I go to Ankara myself I always take the train."
It was still raining in Istanbul. The rain had followed me from Paris, and it had defined each city—making Paris glisten with scattered light; giving the Budapest streets a slop of snow and mud and darkening the mildew on its buildings; muddying Bucharest and filling its potholes with black puddles. But in Istanbul the rain gave the roads a somnolent nobility, because it was a city of waterways and domes and slender minarets and towers that glowed in the diffused light of the downpour. The buildings were masterpieces, but what I remembered was how, at a distance, they were transformed by the rain. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Night train to Ankara | The century-old station at Haydarpasa was floodlit and looked like an opera house on the night I crossed the Bosporus to take the night express to Ankara. "A railway here in Asia—in the dreamy realm of the Orient ... is a strange thing to think of," Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad, when he was in Turkey. "And yet they have one already, and are building another." My night train was leaving at ten-thirty, but I arrived an hour early, sliding to the pier on the ferry from the far bank. The whole station had been renovated. It was obviously regarded as a venerable building, worth preserving; the restoration had been extensive. Years ago, dark and decrepit, its days seemed to be numbered. Now that the train was the best way to go from Istanbul to Ankara, investment in the railways had increased.
The conductor in his new uniform was also an encouraging sign that Turkish railways were in good shape. He was standing by the stairs to the sleeping car. He greeted me, welcomed me aboard, and helped me locate my couchette. I saw that there was a dining car on this train. The carriages were new. All this was a kind of heaven—a private berth, a cozy cabin, a book to read (I was reading Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace), and twelve hours of comfort ahead of me. No border to cross, no interruptions. The other passengers were businessmen, wearing suits, carrying briefcases; a family with two children; and some shrouded women.
Turkish manti (dumplings) were on the dining car menu: flour cubes, cheese, meat, and spices, served with lentil soup and a glass of wine. After eating I turned in, read a chapter of The Flea Palace, and, rocked gently by the movement of the train, hearing the rain lashing the windows, fell asleep.
I awoke eight hours later in bright sunshine, the first rainless day since leaving London, in the dry rough hills and the gravesites and tumuli of Gordion, about sixty miles west of Ankara, where Alexander had slashed the hard-to-pick knot.
Nearer Ankara were new houses, gated communities, college campuses, rows of tenements—the building boom that seemed to be general around the growing cities of Turkey. On my first trip I had summarized Turkey as a peasant economy with colorful ruins, but modernized, mechanized, it had undergone a transformation: it was an exporter of food, literacy was high, and the trains had improved, though most people took buses because the roads were so good.
There was no train to Trabzon; I'd have to take a bus, I was told as soon as I arrived in Ankara and announced my intention of traveling northeast to Georgia and Azerbaijan. My plan was to circumvent Iran while staying on the ground.
I'd been invited to give a talk in Ankara, and it was hinted to me that the setting would be formal. That meant I'd need a necktie, an article I did not possess. I bought one for a few dollars, and that night, to the invited guests, I enlarged on my theme of the return journey, how it reveals the way the world works, and makes fools of pundits and predictors. How it showed, too, the sort of traveler I had been, what I'd seen, what I'd missed the first time. I was not in search of news—had never been, I said. I wanted to know more about the world, about people's lives. I wasn't a hawk in my travels; more a butterfly. But revelation was granted to even the most aimless traveler, who was happier and more receptive to impressions.
"An aimless joy is a pure joy," I said, quoting Yeats.
And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.
Ankara, which had seemed to me long ago a dusty outpost at the edge of the known world, had become a thriving city, important for its manufacturing, bright, youthful, sprawling across the dusty hills and ravines, with three large universities at its periphery. Culturally it had reclaimed its past, the golden age of bull worshipers and philosophers who had flourished thousands of years before, to the west of Ankara at Hatusa.
Mingling with the people who'd attended my talk, many of them academics or politicians, I was told in confidence by a whispering man that they were against the war in Iraq and wished the United States had never invaded.
This mustached man tapped the air with his finger and said to me, "Not a single person in this room is in favor of what America is doing in Iraq." Perhaps self-conscious of his generalization, he turned to look at the hundred or so people in the room he had just characterized, and noticing some Americans, he added, "The Turkish ones, anyway. All of us are against it."
"We were a Turkoman family in Iraq," a woman said to me, and introduced herself as Professor Emel Dogramaci of Çankaya University. "We were powerful in Kirkuk." By powerful, she meant wealthy. The family had become philanthropic in Ankara, having departed Kirkuk, a Kurdish area now. "We left because we were not happy with Saddam."
"Were you glad to see him overthrown?"
"Of course, but not at the cost of this war," she said. "This war is dreadful. It will not help. We don't see when or how it will end. The only certainty is civil war. Well, that is happening now, isn't it?"
I said, "The depressing thing is that it could go on for years."
"I dislike Bush. I prefer Clinton, for all his failings," she said. I admired her confidence, her fluency, her style. She was a woman of a certain age, well dressed, glittering with jewels, opinionated and forthright. "Bush doesn't know anything, but who are these people who are advising Bush? They gave him very bad advice. Did they know what they were doing?"
"Rumsfeld was one of them."
"We know Rumsfeld!" the woman said, snorting at the name. "He was supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. He was supporting Saddam! He was telling us to do the same!"
From their home in Kirkuk her family had observed Donald Rumsfeld paddling palms and pinching fingers with Saddam, and selling him weapons, among them land mines. The Iranian response was to send small children—because children are numerous, portable, and expendable—running, tripping into the minefields to detonate the bombs with their tiny feet, to be blown to pieces.
"This is not political. It is not about oppression. It is a religious war—Sunnis against Shiites," Professor Dogramaci said.
"Which one are you?" I asked.
"I am a cultural Muslim," she said. "I don't go to mosque. But Islam is in my past and my personal history."
"Maybe Iraq will just break up into separate states—Kurdish, Shiite, Sunni," I said.
"That could happen—a sort of federation. But I tell you this," she said, and she faced me full-on, looking darkly at me, and her dress of watered silk, her lovely necklace, and her glittering rings only made her more menacing. "The oil does not belong to the Kurds alone. It belongs to the people of Iraq. If there is a Kurdish state and they claim the oil, and the others are left behind"—she raised her hand, her sparkling fingers—"then I tell you there will be trouble."
"What kind of trouble?" I asked.
"I cannot be specific," she said, and looked like a fierce grandma. "But we will not stand aside and watch it happen."
Inclining her head, listening to this conversation, was Mrs. Zeynep Karahan Uslu, a member of parliament for the ruling AKP, the Justice and Development Party. She was attractive, in her mid-thirties, and had the same independent air as the professor.
Noticing her, the professor's mood lightened. She said, "You see? This woman is a parliamentarian. She has a child. She is from Istanbul. That is her husband, Ibrahim." Ibrahim, watching us, began to smile. "He follows her here to Ankara and looks after the child. Zeynep is a modern Turkish woman. I knew her father, a great scholar. I am so happy to see her!"
"Yes, it's not easy," Zeynep said. "Sometimes we sit in parliament until two or three in the morning. I leave and the police stop me. They see a woman alone in a car. They say, 'What are you doing?' I have to say, 'I have parliamentary business!' This would never happen in Istanbul, where people are up all night. But Ankara is a big, dull city."
Not dull at Hacettepe University, though, where I was to speak the next day. Big posters greeted me: "ABD! EVINE DÖN!"
"'USA—Go Back Home!'" my translator said.
"Is that meant for me?"
"No, no—it's for the demonstration on Saturday," he said, intending to reassure me. "The AKP is organizing it."
Zeynep's party—and she had intimated that the city was dull?
The foyer of the building where I was to speak was hung with posters of Fidel, Che Guevara, and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. It was all like the sixties in the United States: inflammatory posters, yet the students were militant in a Turkish way, polite but firm.
Gory photographs along one wall showed Israeli atrocities in Palestine and massacres in Iraq—bombing victims, mass graves, blown-up houses, shrieking women, mourning families, children with arms and legs blown off, bloody bandages. And in large letters a declaration.
"What does that say?"
"'It is in our hands to stop all this!'"
At one table a pretty girl and a well-dressed boy, obviously students, were selling paper badges, disks trimmed in black ribbon, with a motto in the center.
Before I could ask, my translator said, "'We support Iraq resistance.'"
It was an amazing display, even daunting: flags, bunting, denunciatory posters, angry images, and now that I understood the Turkish words for "USA—Go Back Home!" I saw the demand all over—it followed me down the hallway to the university auditorium.
"Not a single person in this university believes the U.S. is right in the war," one of the teachers told me. "Not one."
Four hundred people were already in their seats. They were literature students. I told them that I was the same age as our bellicose vice president, but that was where our resemblance ended. After Dick Cheney graduated from college, he went to Washington to seek political power, and he never left. I joined the Peace Corps, to teach school in Africa. I distrusted politicians, and I avoided making friends with politically powerful people, because (I said) the nearer you are to such people, the more morally blind you become.
Then I talked about literature. "People will tell you, 'What's the use? What's the point of reading novels and poetry?' They'll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized."
Afterwards I told them that I had been in Turkey thirty-three years ago, when the phones didn't work, and Turks in the hinterland had asked me to sell them my watch and my blue jeans. I could see from where I was standing that everyone had watches and wore blue jeans.
I asked how many of them had cell phones. They all did. And to my other questions: all used the Internet, all used e-mail.
"How many are going to the demonstration on Saturday?"
All. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 15 | "Muhammad was illiterate. He had twelve wives and, let us say, a vivid sexual history," another forthright Turkish professor was saying to me. I was in another part of Ankara, another campus, Bilkent University.
Muhammad the indefatigable womanizer: that is the way the Prophet is depicted by Neguib Mahfouz in his celebrated (but banned in every Arab country) novel Children of the Alley. So I wasn't shocked. But I said, "Do you say these things out loud in Turkey?"
"Everyone knows my views," he said and shrugged. "But these are facts. Ninety percent of what I say would be disputed by orthodox Muslims." He smiled. "Or would be considered heretical."
He was Professor Talât Halman. As a former minister of culture in the Turkish government, and a scholar, writer, and director of the Department of Turkish Literature at Bilkent, he had considerable authority. He had also taught a course at New York University on the history of Islam. He was in his late seventies, he was shrewd and funny, with the ironic and knowing manner of a confident scholar. Over lunch he told me much that I didn't know and had never, until now, inquired about.
"What do we know about Mecca at the time of Muhammad?" I asked.
"Mecca was mainly a pagan city, but with rabbis and priests here and there. The rabbis were suspicious of this new cult of Islam. They repressed it, or at least they tried to. That's why the Koran is full of battles—between Muslims and Jews."
"Are there any historical documents that describe this early friction between Muslims and Jews?"
Professor Halman shook his head. "Not many documents. That's the trouble."
"Why were the rabbis suspicious?"
"They were alarmed by the new ideas and the way they were mingled with the traditional stories." We were having big bowls of fragrant soup, but Professor Halman put his spoon down to explain. "There is always tension present at the origin of a new faith. This has been true through out history. There was lots of friction in Mecca at the time of Muhammad."
"What is the significance of the Kaaba?" I asked, because the huge black cube of shining stone had always seemed to me an enigmatic symbol.
"The Kaaba in Mecca—it's a meteorite, of course."
I hadn't known that, and said so.
"It is obviously a miraculous force of nature," Professor Halman said. "The Jews hadn't claimed it. No one had claimed it—so Muhammad did."
I said, "I'm interested in Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, which is an American religion. Columbus and the American Revolution were foretold in The Book of Mormon, translated from golden plates by Smith in 1827, so he claimed. When he was alive there were apparently lots of other American prophets like him, preaching and professing that God was directing them. Jesus had predecessors too. So how did Muhammad arise as a prophet?"
"There were no proto-Muhammads, as with Jesus and Joseph Smith," the professor said. "From the age of forty, Muhammad had these new ideas. He spoke. People wrote down his words. There's lots of apocrypha, too, especially the Hadith—wise sayings of the Prophet. About a million of them exist, but"—the professor smiled—"who can establish their veracity? This number has been winnowed down to five thousand."
"Can you quote a Hadith?"
He did so, promptly, with an irresistible one: "The ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr."
I said, "Jews don't proselytize, but Muslims do, and they make a lot of converts. What's the attraction?"
"At the time of Muhammad the converts were oppressed peoples. Islam gave them something to fight for—a great sense of victory."
"But I'm thinking of now."
"Even now, the traumatic experiences of colonialism and occupation, the memory of the humiliation of the Crusades. To a great extent, Islam was shaped by conquerors and colonialism."
"So Americans fighting in Iraq will only make Islam stronger?"
"Yes, and bring about more suicide bombers," Professor Halman said. "Martyrdom is important in Islam. There are lots of mentions of martyrdom in the Hadith. There is quite a lot of militarism in the Koran."
"But martyrdom is important in Christianity," I said. "That's one way of becoming a saint."
"Yes. But unlike in Christianity, in Islam it is also good to aid and abet martyrdom," he said. "And giving away money is also a form of martyrdom."
"What I don't understand," I said, "is why Muslims leave Islamic communities and emigrate to places like Germany and Britain, basically Christian countries. To live among Christians and Jews. And Muslims get fractious when they're told not to wear headscarves and so forth. Why bother to emigrate if it makes them so unhappy?"
"They emigrate because their countries are backward," the professor said with superb good sense. "Better to emigrate than to starve to death."
"Muslim boys were burning cars in Paris a few months ago."
He said, "A North African has limited choices. He can only go to a Francophone country. He ends up in France and sees it is secular, and he objects. But you see Muslims are also reacting against political oppression."
"Tell me how this applies to Iraq now."
"American experts are the problem," Professor Halman said. "They were wrong about the Soviet Union and wrong about Iraq. They are academics and bureaucrats with vested interests."
"Sinister forces?"
"Not sinister but obtuse. The ones who said the Soviet Union was strong were politically motivated, perhaps. They didn't know how weak the Soviets were."
"So the U.S. government gets the wrong advice?"
"Yes, and mainly from scholars. Scholars need to validate the status quo, or they will lose their funding."
"The last time I took this trip," I said, "the shah was in power. Everyone said he was strong and progressive, though it was clear to me that the countryside was reactionary and orthodox Muslim."
"That's a point. Advice-givers don't travel enough," he said. "Where are you going next?"
"Up to Trabzon, then Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and—" I stopped; it seemed unlucky to mention more countries.
"That's good," he said. "Ankara is a dreary place."
"But I've had an interesting time here."
"It's a wasteland," he said. "And Turks are a melancholy people." He pressed his fingers to his temples as though to accelerate his memory. "I think there's been trouble in Trabzon. I can't remember what."
So I headed out of Ankara intending to leave Turkey. Long ago, Turkey had seemed a distant and exotic country of frowning men and enigmatic women, with unreliable telephones and simple roads and a dramatic, confrontational culture. Now it had everything, it was part of the visitable world, but it was no longer the way to Iran and Afghanistan, so I headed north. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Night train to Tbilisi | The trouble in Trabzon, on the Black Sea, where I found filthy weather, ugly rumors, and ill tidings, was the incident that had slipped Professor Halman's mind: the murder a month before of an unbeliever in a fit of sentimental fury. This singular outrage—singular because such things seldom happened in Turkey—was the shooting of an Italian priest, Father Andrea Santoro, by an overexcited Islamist named Oguz intending to avenge the honor of Muhammad in a controversy over mocking cartoons of the Prophet that had appeared in various European newspapers. Oguz, who was sixteen, was caught the day after the murder, and Father Santoro's corpse was given a solemn sendoff, attended by the highest Muslim clergy in Turkey, the muftis.
Symbolism is everything in religious strife, which is why it looks so logical, while being so stupid and brutal. The Catholic was singled out and shot for symbolizing the enemy, as any outsider might be, including me. The poor man had been praying in a back pew of the Santa Maria Church in Trabzon, where, on an average Sunday, there were no more than a dozen communicants. Rare as this murder was, it was so recent it concentrated my mind on leaving Trabzon. On arriving I'd asked, "What are the sights?" and been told the ancient mosque was a must-see. It was a Friday, a day of prayer in this (so I was also told) pious city. I should add that not once in Turkey was I hassled for being an unbeliever, nor was the subject ever mentioned. But the rain got me down, so I began to look for ways to escape it.
Because there was no train, I had arrived on the night bus from Ankara, the Ulusoy coach—Greyhound standard—with frequent pit stops on the twelve-hour ride to the northeast, allowing passengers to get out and smoke, since smoking had been banned on Turkish buses. The exception was the bus driver, who could light up as much as he wished. These were also eating stops, at rest-area cafeterias, where the food was not bad: thick soup, trays of reddish beans, sinister slabs of meat drifting in black gravy, scorched kebabs, and bread in round loaves the diameter of a steering wheel.
Over the mountains in darkness from Ankara, and still in darkness to Samsun and the edge of the Black Sea, we followed the coast road serenely until the day lifted. In the dreary, sunless dawn the towns on the shore, Ordu, Giresun, Tirebolu, and nameless little settlements, looked ugly and lifeless, with hideous new buildings and ramshackle older ones on the barren coast. Yet the steep escarpment just behind the coast was beautiful, dark with wooded hills, and farther back the mountains loomed in a tangle of rain clouds.
The sight of the Black Sea made the passengers happy. They were all Turks, clearly glad to be away from Ankara, which was overbuilt and modern, set in the dry hills; this was the drizzly shore of an inland sea.
"Karadeniz," the old man next to me said when he woke and saw the water. I had once sailed on a Turkish ship called the Akdeniz—meaning the White Sea, which is what the Turks call the Mediterranean—so I understood this as the Black Sea. He marveled, smiled, elbowed his wife in the ribs. Like the other men on the bus he wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie. In the course of the twelve-hour ride through the night, these men loosened their ties a little.
Judging from what I'd seen from Istanbul to Ankara to Trabzon, a building boom had overwhelmed Turkey, new houses everywhere, and the newer ones were dreadful, lopsided, misshapen, thrown together, and looked dangerously combustible; they were famous for falling down at the slightest earth tremor, of which seismic-prone Turkey had plenty.
But once I stowed my bag in a bus station locker and hiked to the foot of Trabzon's hill and up the steep winding streets to the middle of town, I changed my mind about the ugly houses. Trabzon was a pleasant place, even in the rain: a compact town center, the usual Turkish shops selling food and clothes and sweets, but also something I hadn't expected: banyos, bathhouses. And I had the sense they were traditional baths and that this was not a euphemism for knocking shops.
I saw a man being luxuriously shaved in a barbershop, so I went in and, using grunts and signs, asked for the same. The whole process, with a haircut, took forty-five minutes; after the long bus ride I was restored.
Near the barbershop was a hotel that was undistinguished but clean. The room rate was $350 a night—who would pay that in Trabzon? Instead of checking in, I used the breakfast buffet in the restaurant, telling the clerk that I would pay for it. He said okay, so I idled over breakfast and tried to make a plan for my onward journey. I had seriously pondered my options: after weeks of travel I was still facing terrible weather, wet and cold, the north wind blowing off the Black Sea from Odessa; the recent murder of the Italian priest, for being Christian, was not encouraging; and the main point of interest in Trabzon was a mosque.
When I finished, deciding that I would head east, out of town, and took out my money, the clerk waved me away. I repeated that I was not a guest of the hotel. The clerk just smiled and said, "No problem," indicated that it was a slow day in Trabzon, and added, "Beer-shay de-eel"—You're welcome.
I walked back to where I had stowed my bag and on the way saw a sign advertising buses to the Georgia border and beyond: Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, and other distant places. I went into a bus agency, and the door chime went ding-dong. Some women in black gowns were watching the Iraqi war news—scenes of American tanks—on a black-and-white television. They were eating pink popcorn out of a bag.
"Ticket, please?"
But the man at the desk scarcely looked up from his newspaper.
"Bus is fool."
"Just one seat," I said.
"Is fool"
"Excuse me, effendi." This politeness seized his attention. "I have serious business in Teeflees," I said, using the Turkish pronunciation. "Very serious."
He looked up at me and licked his thumb, manipulated a printed pad, and clicking his pen wrote me a ticket.
"Leaving at thirteen o'clock," he said and went back to his newspaper. The shrouded women had kept their attention on the war news.
But in the event, the bus left at noon—good thing I was early, drinking a coffee next door to the stop. The bus was more than full: many people were sitting on the floor, on each other's laps, or straphanging. I could see no space at all. The driver poked my arm and said gruffly, "You sit here," and indicated a cushion next to him, on the step. "In Hopa, many seats." Hopa was near the Turkish border; the border post was a place called Sarp.
So I sat on a cushion on the floor of this crowded, beat-up bus, pleased with myself for being an older man, thus invisible, ghostly, grubbier than most of the bus passengers, some of them Turks going to Hopa, and the rest Georgians on their way over the border to Batumi. The Georgians were the ones with big black plastic sacks, bulging with Turkish goods that were apparently unobtainable in Georgia—children's clothes, toys, toasters, telephones, microwave ovens, and boxes of cookies. All this luggage boded ill for the upcoming customs inspection.
Only a hundred-odd miles to Hopa, but the entire coast road was being repaved, and we went so slowly and stopped so often the trip took five hours. I told myself that I was not in any hurry, and I smiled when I remembered saying to the ticket seller, I have serious business in Teeflees, because I had no business at all. This was one of those times when I was reminded again of how travel was a bumming evasion, a cheap excuse for intruding upon other people's privacy.
We passed some friendly-looking towns, and stopped at many to pick up passengers. At Rize and Pazar we stopped for food. The hills beyond Rize were dark with tea bushes, and the Black Sea was motionless, as though we were at the shore of a glorified lake—no current, no tide, no chop or waves, more famous now for allowing prostitutes to be ferried across the water from Odessa to the Turkish shore.
We went through Hopa, where a two-mile line of trucks was parked, awaiting permission to go farther. I got off the bus at the border, Sarp. The driver told me that we would all go through customs and immigration and then meet again and reboard the bus on the Georgian side. I thought: Not me, effendi.
One of the pleasures of such a journey is walking across a border, strolling from one country to another, especially countries where there is no common language. Turkish is incomprehensible to Georgians, and Georgians boast that there is no language on earth that resembles Georgian; it is not in the Indo-European family but rather the Kartvelian, or South Caucasian, one. Georgians triumphantly point out that their language is unique, since the word for mother is deda and the word for father is mama.
I paid $20 for a Georgian visa, got my passport stamped, was saluted by the soldier on duty, and walked into Georgia, where I learned there was a two-hour time difference from the other side of the border. It would be an hour or more before the bus passengers cleared their toasters and microwaves through Turkish customs. So when a Georgian taxi driver began pestering me, I listened—more than that, I offered him a cup of coffee.
His name was Sergei. We sat in a border café, out of the rain. He said business was not good. I looked for something to eat, but there were only stale buns and boxes of crackers. As soon as you leave Turkey, by whatever border crossing, the quality of the food plunges.
"You go Batumi?"
I said, "Maybe. How much?"
He mentioned a sum of money in Georgian lari. I translated this into dollars and said, "Ten dollars. Batumi."
This delighted him. And Batumi was thirty miles away, so I was happy too.
"You get bus, Batumi to Tbilisi."
"How long does it take?" I asked.
"Six o'clock. Seven o'clock."
He meant six or seven hours. I said, "Is there a train?"
"Yes, but train take nine o'clock, ten o'clock."
"Sleeping car—Schlafwagen?"
He nodded, yes. So I threw my bag in the back seat of his car, got in the front with him, and off we went, dodging potholes and deep mud puddles. The road was empty. He said that in the summer people flocked here for a Black Sea vacation, but I found this hard to imagine: there were no obvious hotels; the houses were small and dark, as though mossy; the coastal road was in bad shape and, unlike its Turkish counterpart, was not being repaired.
Never mind, I was bouncing towards Batumi in a cold drizzly dusk—into the unknown, a place I'd never been. Its very dreariness and decrepitude were a consolation. I could see from the border, the roadside, Sergei in his old car, and the men laboring with pushcarts that this was a benighted place, not expensive, and slightly creepy—wonderful, really, because I was alone and had all the time in the world. No sign of any other tourist or traveler; I had walked across the frontier into this wolfish landscape. And if Sergei was correct in saying that there was a night train to Tbilisi, it would be perfect.
It seemed to me that this was the whole point of traveling—to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people didn't see many strangers and were hospitable and did not instantly think of me as money on two legs. Life was harder but simpler here—I could see it in the rough houses and the crummy roads and the hayricks and the boys herding goats. Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans was a liberating event. I told myself that it was a solemn occasion for discovery, but I knew better: it was more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet.
Batumi was a low coastal town of puddly streets and dimly lit shops and Georgians in heavy clothes hunched over, plodding in the rain. On the outskirts were plump central Asian bungalows, and approaching the center of town at dusk was like entering a cloudy time warp where it was permanently muddy and old-fashioned. In the 1870s it had been a boom town built on the oil fortunes of the Rothschilds and the Nobels.
"Football," Sergei said.
We passed a muddy soccer field.
"Sharsh."
We passed a round church with an elaborate spire and a sharp-edged Christian cross on top.
"Shakmat club."
Shakmat is Persian for checkmate: "king death." The chess club, a big building and one of the newest in Batumi.
We kept going, and Sergei conveyed to me in broken English that the train station was not in Batumi but farther up the coast in a village called Makinjauri, where passengers boarded and tickets could be bought.
This, the last, westernmost stop on the Trans-Caucasian Railroad, was not a station but rather a rural platform under a grove of leafless trees and bright lights. Near it stood a ticket booth, the size and shape of one of those narrow little carnival sheds that offer tickets to the merry-go-round. I bought a first-class berth to Tbilisi for about $15 and felt I had lucked out, for the train was not leaving for hours. I paid off Sergei and enthusiastically tipped him for being helpful, then wandered around, looking for a place to eat.
Babushkas in aprons, bulky skirts, headscarves, and thick leggings welcomed me into a cold, lamp-lit one-room restaurant, and one of them, explaining with gestures, made me a Georgian dish—a big round puffy loaf filled with cheese and baked in a pan, then cut into wedges. Peasant food, simple and filling. I drank two soapy-tasting bottles of beer and asked for more detail, which they cheerfully gave me: as we were in Batumi, this was Adjaruli cuisine—west Georgian style.
Some factory workers stopped in, and their English was sufficient for them to explain to me that they came here every evening at this time for the stew; so I ordered some of that, too, and like them, ate it with a wheel of bread.
"What country?"
"America."
"Good country. I want to go!"
A sense of out of this world, I scribbled in my notebook between bites. Cold, dirty room, old beaky women with raw hands in thick clothes; poor lighting, jumping shadows, a sputtering samovar, people talking in low voices; all weirdly pleasant. At the ragged edge of Georgia—the ragged edge of Turkey, too—I was happy.
At some point the rain stopped. The darkness turned frigid, the night glistening with frost crystals that were star-like, and overhead, stars were visible above the Black Sea. At Makinjauri Station, on the exposed platform, a hundred or so people waiting for the train were stamping their feet and chafing their hands to keep warm, yawning because it was so late and so cold.
I had a compartment to myself. I bought some bottled water from a stall on the platform. Two blankets and a quilt were piled on my berth, and after punching my ticket the conductor gave me a sealed package: bed sheets with bunnies printed on them.
So I lay down and read the opening pages of Conrad's The Shadow-Line and fell asleep as we traveled north along the coast and then headed inland.
It was an old noisy train with clanging wheels, and couplings that banged as we went through the mountains; but it rocked like a cast-iron cradle, and I slept so well on the ten-hour trip I did not awake until we were almost at Tbilisi.
Even on the outskirts of the capital the full moon lighted the huts in the hills, giving it all the look of a Gothic landscape, darkness and blunted shadow, and rooftops and hilltops bluey white from the cold moon. As I watched from the window outside my compartment, I nod ded to another watcher, a man in a blue suit, plump, a head of white hair, a cell phone to his ear, and when I smiled he sprang forward and shook my hand. The clamminess of his handshake made me guess that he was a Georgian politician. He acknowledged that he was, of President Mikhail Saakashvili's party.
Tbilisi Station was grim, poorly lit, stinking of ragged squatters, littered with blowing papers, and on a frosty morning in March not a place I wanted to linger. I took a taxi and, choosing a hotel at random, checked in and went for a walk. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 17 | In the course of idling there, I found that Georgians do not call their country Georgia. They give it its ancient name, Sakartvelo, after its legendary founder. "Georgia" is from the Persian Gorjestan, Land of the Wolf. Armenians call the place Vir, another ancient name, a variation of "Iberia." But by whatever name, it was a supine and beleaguered country of people narcissistic about their differences.
I thought: If you simply flew into Tbilisi, you'd take this to be a pleasant if elderly-looking city of some lovely buildings and quite a few decaying older ones; of many—perhaps too many—gambling casinos; of boulevards and genteel tenements and ancient churches sited with emphatic plumpness on the rocky splendor of low hills; a presentable city divided by the gull-clawed Kura River. And you would be utterly deceived by this look of prosperity.
Overland from Turkey, through Hopa and Sarp and muddy Batumi, from the frosty platform at Makinjauri and onward, passing the towns and villages of Kutaisi, Khashuri, Kaspi, and Gori—Gori, where Iosif Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin, was born in 1879, "a lame, pock-marked, web-toed boy," urchin, street fighter, and choirboy at Gori Church School, before going to a seminary in Tbilisi and becoming a gang leader and bank robber—the railway line showed that Georgia is essentially a peasant economy, struggling, backward-looking, Russophobic, mildly discontented, riven by dissent over the breakaway province of Abkhazia, and, in the raw dark days of late winter, proud but hard-pressed.
Many people in Tbilisi mentioned to me how, less than two months before, in one of the coldest winters in memory, the Russians had cut off Georgia's supply of natural gas. Within hours, the heat vanished from all households and factories, and a black frost descended. Other than firewood—and even that was in short supply in the deforested countryside—Georgia had no energy of its own. The country was without power, Tbilisi seized up, the traffic lights went off, businesses shut down, schools and hospitals were in darkness. The Russians claimed that terrorists had blown up the gas pipeline, but President Saakashvili loudly denounced the Russians, accusing them of deliberate malice—after all, Ukrainians had not long before suffered the same frozen fate when their energy payments to Russia were in arrears.
Politicians in the Georgian cabinet ostentatiously handed out cans of kerosene. Less ostentatiously, trucks dumped loads of firewood on street corners for people to fight over. But the temperature remained below freezing, the river was iced over, the snow was deep, and fresh snowfalls blocked the thoroughfares.
"People were building fires in the streets to keep warm," a woman told me.
Russophobia in Georgia reached new levels of intensity as the whole country shivered; and at last, after a week of suffering, Tbilisi looking as if doomsday had come—snowbound, frozen, corpse-like, frostbitten—the gas supply returned. But Georgia was reminded of its vulnerability, its poverty, its desperation, its dependence on Russia, and its lack of adequate resources.
The weather was still cold and foggy when I arrived, but out of curiosity I decided to stay put for a few days. The hotel I'd found was near the center of the city; I set off walking. I had arrived on a weekend, when people from Tbilisi and the suburbs hold a collective flea market on the streets near the river and across the bridge—and so I was able to see people parting with light fixtures and lamps, faucets, postcards, plastic souvenirs, photographs, brassware, radios, candlesticks, samovars, and religious paraphernalia, including crucifixes and paintings. Business was slow; there were many more sellers than buyers. The hawkers were older people, obviously trying to raise money, and it was obvious too that in many cases they were offering heirlooms for sale, literally the family silver—plates, spoons, salt shakers, teapots. The items that interested me were the icons, some of them silver or silver-plated, and after a few days of browsing, I bought a silver icon.
Big central Asian porches of shaped wooden gingerbread and carved screens jutted from some older buildings, and one whole district of traditional houses—and mosques, and a synagogue, too—had been reno vated. But walking in a drearier part of the city, I passed a large crowd of people jostling on a sidewalk, an irregular line of contending humans in ragged clothes trying to squeeze themselves against a narrow door that gave onto David Agmashenebeli Avenue.
A young man appeared from inside the door and held up a square of cardboard with a number on it. I could read it: 471. As though she'd just won at bingo, an old woman, looking pleased, screeched and waved a scrap of paper—her number was 471—and she pushed herself through the crowd and into the doorway.
This happened two more times while I watched. More numbers were announced—472, 473—and the winners admitted to the building. The building had an air of elegance, though like many others in this district it had fallen into ruin. But there was no sign on the building, only the crowd of people out front, each person waiting for his or her number to be called. What exactly was happening?
"Excuse me." I followed the last people in. They were a small family—father, mother, child. They did not look distressed; they were warmly clothed, and the man had been bantering with the others left standing on the street corner, impatiently jostling.
What seemed to me an old haunted mansion had a lobby like a ballroom, with a high ceiling, leaded windows, some of them fitted with stained glass. Still, it seemed less like a mansion than a Masonic hall. No one challenged me, so I kept walking and looking around—the place was pleasantly warm and smelled of fresh bread. I followed the aroma and found two twenty-year-olds who were English-speakers, Marina and Alex.
"What's happening here?" I asked.
"This is the House of Charity," Alex said.
Marina stepped back and gestured. She said, "And this is the man."
A pale, rather small man with a thin fox-like face and dark close-set eyes swept forward and stared at me, not in hostility but in a sort of querulous nibbling welcome. He wore a vaguely clerical outfit: black frock coat buttoned to his chin, an overcoat draped like a cape over his shoulders. Adding to his mysterious ecclesiasticism were his black boots, an occult-looking insignia on a heavy chain around his neck, and pinned to one lapel a ribbon-like adornment. He was about fifty, strangely confident for such a pale soul, and upright, with the messianic stare you find in people who have a sense of destiny, a belief that they are doing the right thing. In his heavy cape-like coat, his pasted-down hair, and his sallow, somewhat tormented saint's face, I put him down in my notebook in one word, Dostoyevskian.
"This—everything you see—was his idea," Marina said.
"What do you do here?"
Instead of answering my question, Marina translated it for the man in black, and he replied in Georgian, which she translated back into English.
"We feed people," he said. "We feed all the people. Usually we feed about three hundred fifty a day, but today is Open Door Day, so we will be feeding fifteen hundred people."
"Are all of them poor?" I asked. This was translated.
"We ask no questions. Everyone is welcome. Some of them can afford to buy food, others are starving, but we make no distinction."
"Is this part of some religion?"
The pale man smiled when he heard this. He had tiny, even teeth in his vulpine, small boy's face. He said triumphantly, "No message! No religion!"
"So ask him why he does it," I said to Marina.
She spoke for a while with him, he gave monosyllabic replies, and finally he shrugged and uttered a few sentences in Georgian.
"He says the reasons are too deep to discuss. It could take days to explain why he does this."
Meanwhile, numbers were being shouted at the front door. Hungry people were hurrying in, smiling sated people were leaving, poking their yellow teeth with toothpicks.
"How about just a hint?" I asked, and Marina pressed him.
He replied, "In 1989, many men were seeking power and had political ambition." He meant at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Georgia was free. I decided to do something different from that—maybe the opposite of seeking power, something humble and helpful, not political, not religious either. This was what I thought of."
Now people were pushing past us to get to the dining hall, which had a number of tables big and small, about 150 places. When a person vacated a chair, a number was displayed outside and a hungry person tore in, scuffing in wet boots towards the smell of food.
We stepped back to let the traffic flow. I asked the man his name.
He was Oleg Lazar-Aladashvili, and he called this effort Catharsis. He had run it for the past sixteen years.
"Catharsis, in Greek, means spiritual cleansing through compassion," he said. ("Spiritual renewal through purgation," my dictionary also explains.)
"We have another house in Moscow," he said. "Our principles are charity, nonviolence, and anti-AIDS. We also provide medical services and help to homeless people."
"To anyone who asks?"
He became specific. He said, "We provide help not as a gift but as a reward for work." Everyone who was helped had to pitch in and do something—either assist in one of the programs or be a janitor in the building.
Oleg said that the building, this mansion that had confused me, had been the headquarters of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, but the party no longer mattered. People who'd benefited from Catharsis had helped paint and decorate it, made murals, tapestries, and pictures. Wealthy families in Tbilisi had contributed jewelry, paintings, icons, and antiques. Pope John Paul II had visited in February 1999 and donated a Bible. The Archbishop of Canterbury had also visited. Their signed pictures were hung in Oleg's office, which had an ecclesiastical atmosphere—heavy furniture, velvet cushions, gold tassels, a maroon carpet, stained-glass windows, leather-bound books, an enormous desk.
I gave Marina a $20 bill and said that I would like to have a meal in the dining room.
"It is free," Oleg said.
"But take the money anyway," I said.
"Money makes no difference. The food is for everyone. We don't scrutinize the people we feed."
Perhaps without realizing it, Oleg had paraphrased one of the precepts of the Diamond Sutra: Buddha teaches that the mind of a Bodhisattva should not accept the appearances of things as a basis when exercising charity.
"Please," I said, and put the money in his hand.
"You must have a receipt," Marina said.
"You can give it to me later."
"No. The receipt must be given now."
The special pad had to be found, then a pen, and finally a special stamp—the insignia of Catharsis, which was an upright bar with a diagonal crossbar and some squiggles. This took longer than I expected, and in their fuss to provide a receipt I began to regret my donation, pathetically small though it was. The laborious business to give me a receipt was like satirizing my twenty bucks.
Then they escorted me to the dining hall—one of the three dining rooms. After the religiosity of the office, this scene was almost Chaucerian, something medieval and bawdy about each heavily dressed, red-faced person gobbling at a big tin bowl of soup and a big bowl of bread—a whole round loaf cut into chunks—and a saucer of noodle salad sprinkled with oregano. The clank of spoons, the slurping of soup, the laughter, the yelling, children squawking, bowls being brought in on trays and banged down on the trestle tables: it was a rollicking scene of appetite and good cheer. And there were serving wenches—girls in aprons with mobcaps and billowy blouses, their faces glowing, perspiring from their work of wiping down tables and serving soup.
Isabella Kraft was one of them. She was from Cologne, Germany, from a large family—she had brothers and sisters. She was twenty, slightly built, blond, very pretty, and looking overworked and earnest, ringlets of dampened hair adhering to her forehead.
"I've been here six months," she told me. "I'll be here for a year altogether. I finished school and I heard they needed people."
All were volunteers, she said. She liked the idea that no questions were asked of the people, that no message was handed over other than the obvious charitable one.
"I do this in my spare time," Isabella said.
"What do you do the rest of the time?"
"I work with handicapped children," she said. She had the passionate intensity I had seen in Oleg's eyes, but she smiled, had a sense of humor; she was ardent, humble, unselfish, with no pretensions.
"Isabella! Stop talking and start working!" an old woman screamed.
"That is the supervisor," Isabella said and laughed. She called back, "He is from America!"
"Take me to America!" the toothless old woman next to me screamed, shaking her big soup spoon at me in a dripping demand.
Other diners at the long table began teasing and laughing. It was an unimaginably happy room of contented eaters with food-splashed faces, people with a hunk of bread in one hand and a spoon in the other, attacking bowls of thick beany soup.
None of the volunteers had anything to preach; no philosophy was imparted about what they were doing. They simply labored without question. And because operating costs were low, practically the whole budget was used for food. Oleg later told me that he got money from local companies, Oxfam, and various United Nations agencies, but that even without their help he would have continued to run the charity.
For the helpers it was a kind of inspired drudgery to which they brought humanity. Most of them were from other European countries, living frugally and far from home; they were uncomplaining, learning humility, but also in a position to understand the very heart of Georgia. I admired them for following the fundamental tenet of Buddhism, the key text of the Buddhist way, utter selflessness, perhaps without knowing any word of the Diamond Sutra.
Inevitably, a little later, on a nearby street I saw some Georgian youths skidding around corners too fast in their crappy cars and shouting out the window, playing rap music much too loudly and being stupid. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 18 | Now and then you meet someone at a party or at a friend's house and he says, "I'm from Tbilisi"—or wherever—"and if you ever visit, you must look me up."
And you say, "Absolutely," but the day never comes, for why on earth would you ever go to Tbilisi? And usually the person is merely being polite and doesn't mean it. But Gregory and Nina, whom I had met a few years before in Massachusetts, seemed sincere.
And there I was in Tbilisi, under wintry skies, with time on my hands. And so I made the call.
"Are you going to be here tomorrow?" Nina asked.
"Oh, yes," I said.
"Then you must come to the ballet." Nina was a ballerina in the Georgia State Opera Company, and Gregory was her husband. "It's the premiere of Giselle. Come to the Opera Theater at seven. Ask for Lizaveta. She will have a ticket for you. We will meet you in the box."
The Opera Theater was a notable landmark of Tbilisi. I found it easily on foot. An imposing cheese-colored nineteenth-century edifice on the main boulevard, Rustaveli Avenue, it was built at a time when Russia—which had annexed Georgia in 1801—regarded an opera house as essential to the romantic idea of Georgia as one of the more picturesque regions of the Russian empire. Georgians were great agriculturalists, and their vineyards were renowned, but Georgians also danced and sang.
It turned out that Nina was not merely a prima ballerina but also head of the opera company. When I met her in the box, she had recently given birth to a little girl.
Gregory, who was a prosperous investor and also a doting husband and Nina's manager, said, "But she will dance next year. She will prove that you can have a baby and also be a great ballerina."
Other people—mostly friends and relations—were already seated.
Introducing me, Nina said, "This is Paul. He went through Africa alone!"
"Is true?" a woman said.
"By autostop," Nina said.
"Not really," I said.
But the woman hadn't heard. She had turned to tell her husband that I had hitchhiked through Africa.
Then Giselle began. The title role was performed by a ballerina from the Bolshoi. The male lead, Prince Albrecht, was a local dancer who was only twenty-one. He was cheered when he appeared onstage. I had no idea what I was in for. I knew nothing about ballet, but it seemed to me a melodious way of spending an evening in Tbilisi.
After my rainy journey of bleak hills and foggy valleys and muddy roads, this packed opera house—warm and well fed—was the antithesis of Batumi: pale pretty sprites in tutus, men in tights, some of them spinning, some of them leaping, and an orchestra pit where men in tuxedos scraped out mellifluous tunes and cascading harmonies.
I was sitting comfortably in a gilt chair, resting on velvet cushions, watching Prince Albrecht (in disguise) fall in love with the peasant girl Giselle. But there was a hitch: he had been betrothed to Bathilda, the Duke's daughter. Giselle also had another and very excitable lover. Lots of prancing and leaping and flinging of arms, and finally identities were revealed, sending Giselle off her head. Just before the prolonged and ex quisite death agonies of Giselle, she heard the Wilis—"the spirits of young girls who died before their wedding day," the program said—and then she died.
Second act: Giselle was now transformed into one of the Wilis. She was reunited with Albrecht and danced with him through the night. In so doing she saved his life, before she vanished at dawn. An angelic kickline of flitting nymphs, eloquent mime, syrupy music, slender legs, graceful leaps, and strange moves, especially Giselle's as she hopped on one toe while propelling herself by kicking her other leg, receiving wild applause and bravas.
This ballet induced such a feeling of well-being in me that I sat smiling tipsily at the big red curtain for quite a while after it fell.
And then I heard, "This is Paul. He went through Africa by hitchhike!"
"Not exactly," I said. "Do you speak English?"
"As a matter of fact, yes," the woman said. "I'm British. I'm just visiting."
She was, she said, a ballet correspondent for a London newspaper, in Tbilisi for the week. She would be writing about this.
Still besotted by the ballet, I asked, "How do you even begin evaluating something as pleasant as this?"
"The corps de ballet needs work," she said without hesitating, "though they're about average for this part of the world, and if they keep working really hard they'll have a chance of being something watchable in about two years."
So much for my angelic kick-line of flitting nymphs.
"The male lead, I'm afraid, doesn't really have what it takes," she went on, "though you can see the chap is trying his best." She smiled grimly and dismissed him with a wave of her hand. "That ballerina from the Bolshoi, Anastasia Goryacheva, is talented. She performed well, but she was terribly let down by the orchestra. They were just so plodding. They're all second-rate players, not real symphony musicians. I mean, they hardly seemed to care."
So much for the mellifluous harmonies I'd heard.
Her criticism was probably accurate, though the audience had been more enthusiastic, had cheered the ballet all the way through, and had applauded numerous curtain calls. As for me, who had happened upon this spectacle and gaped like a dazed dog, I was grateful for the warmth and the music and the sight of the weightless legs of flitting nymphs moving to and fro on tippy-toe. |
Ghost Train to Eastern Star | Paul Theroux | [
"travel",
"Asia",
"adventure",
"India",
"trains"
] | [] | Chapter 19 | A woman named marika, who had also been at the ballet, offered to show me around Tbilisi—the parts that had been renovated, the districts that were still dilapidated, the ancient villas, the Soviet bureaus, the synagogues and mosques. But I found Marika more interesting than any of this real estate.
She was in her mid-thirties and, she said, from a noble family, large landowners, their ancestral home in Ratja. Both her grandfather and great-grandfather had spent time in Soviet prisons, thirteen years in her grandfather's case, for being members of the Georgian aristocracy and therefore counterrevolutionaries. One prison, part of the gulag in Kazakhstan, was a remote work camp near the city of Karaganda. Later, I read that Solzhenitsyn had spent a year in the same camp.
"You're a writer," Marika said. "You're lucky to be an American. Our writers were put into a prison in Mordva. It was a terrible place but had a nice name—White Swan Prison."
In 2001, Marika worked for a while at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tbilisi, earning 30 lari a month.
"That's not much, is it?"
"Fifteen dollars," she said. She added that after various political upheavals, the most recent being the so-called Rose Revolution of 2004, which had been aimed at rooting out crooked politicians, government salaries had improved and she began earning $160 a month. She was now working for an insurance company, earning $200, and just getting by.
Gregory had told me that business was good, tourism was up, and the service industries—he did not specify which ones—were busy. Gregory also owned a vineyard, but said that though it was good-sized, wine-making was merely a hobby.
"Then what business are you in?" I asked.
"I'm managing Nina. But just for fun. I live on revenues and investments."
So he was doing fine and was well connected. Marika had another story. She said that business was abysmal. Food was still cheap but sala ries were pathetic. Most people her age spoke of emigrating to the United States. In this connection, she said that George Bush had come the previous year—in May 2005—and had received a rapturous welcome. This had something to do with Georgia needing a powerful friend, for Georgia was, geographically speaking, in a bad neighborhood, bordered by unfriendly Russians, the breakaway region of Abkhazia, the bandit-haunted valleys of Dagestan, and the dangerous ruin of Chechnya, with its Islamic guerrillas and frequent bombings.
"What about emigrating to Turkey?"
"No," she said, though some people would settle for a job in Europe.
We strolled, talking about the bleak, not to say obscure, future, and soon came to a restaurant.
"Have you had khajapuri?" she said.
"Yes. In Batumi"
"Then you have to try Georgia's other national dish, khingali"
This turned out to be a big bowl of broth with dumplings, some of them filled with meat, called khafsuru, others with greens, called kalakuri. The restaurant was fairly crowded, mostly with families at the wooden tables, everyone eating dumplings with their fingers, Georgian style.
Marika wasn't complaining, but it seemed to me depressing that a university graduate with perhaps fifteen years experience working in a big city should be paid so little.
On my previous trip I met many poorly paid workers, but they lived in an era of sealed borders and expensive travel. They expected no better and had no means to leave wherever they happened to be. But in these days of cheap travel, the world had shrunk, and anyone with access to a computer—which seemed to be most city people—knew that life was better elsewhere. The places I had known, of settled people in villages and towns, of working urbanites in big cities, with their civic pride and cultural pieties, these homebodies whose horizon was their national frontier, had all (it seemed to me) become soured and discontented. The world of settled people had evolved into a world of people wishing to emigrate. There was hardly any distinction, and not much romance, in being a traveler. It was now a world of travelers, or people dreaming of a life elsewhere—far away. Please, take me to America!
Some cultural pieties still persisted. Gregory and Nina invited me the next day to the christening of their daughter, Elena. The ceremony was performed in the district of Metekhi, in an old Eastern Orthodox church that had been built and rebuilt from ancient times. The church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. More out of national pride than religious sanctimony, Georgians boast that Christianity was brought by Saint Nino from Greece in the fourth century (incidentally, at about the time it was spreading through Ethiopia). Saint Nino's image was everywhere.
Little Elena, just over a month old, pink-faced and beatific, was swaddled in a heavy blanket and wore a bobble hat. A very short priest chanted and made repeated signs of the cross. He had a bushy beard, an enormous nose, and a hat shaped like a tea cozy, which gave him the look of a garden gnome costumed as a Smurf. Tapers were lighted, candles were waved, icons were kissed, a profusion of genuflection and energetic idolatry. There were no pews—no seats at all.
We stood and watched the dwarfish bearded priest pressing his forehead against a saint's picture and murmuring prayers. The baby was being bounced: no sign of holy water.
Cell phones also rang, men were chatting into them and making calls, other people were talking among themselves, laughing, greeting newcomers, inserting lari into the poorboxes, and some of them even praying.
Strangely, Gregory and Nina were excluded from the ceremony and stood some distance away, but watched eagerly as the godparents coddled Elena. I was excluded as well, but when I took too great an interest in a very shiny candle-lit icon, a man in a black smock hissed at me and indicated with angry gestures that I was standing too close.
"Up yours," I said, smiling, and returned to the christening, which had become dramatic.
The baby was stripped naked, her bobble hat removed. And then I realized that the church was cold. Her skinny arms and legs began to thrash, and whimperings issued from her little red body.
The gnome-like priest adjusted his odd ecclesiastical Smurf hat and beckoned the godparents to the baptismal font, which stood like a large marble sink at the side of the church. He took the baby and immersed her in the cold water—totally, head to foot, as though he were rinsing a chicken. As he pronounced her new name and recited the baptismal formula ("and I renounce the devil and all his pomps"), baby Elena began to howl. She went on howling for quite a while, but who could blame her?
Then, as Elena was turning purple, the future ballerina was wrapped in her warm blanket, people kissed and shook hands, the mother and father received the priest's blessing, and sums of money were bestowed.
Aware of the superstitious sentimentality in such a rite, a number of opportunistic old women seized the chance to line the path that led down the hill from the church, and there they crouched, their confident hands extended for alms.
Some customs don't change. That baptismal ceremony had been performed in that very church since the early seventh century—indeed, the Byzantine era, before Arab caliphs took over in the year 654 and made Tbilisi an emirate.
When it came time for me to leave Tbilisi for Baku, I was offered a lift by one of Gregory's friends.
"It's no problem. I can take you to the airport," he said.
"Railway station," I said.
He scowled at me. "You're going on the train?"
"That's right."
"On the train?" he repeated hoarsely, in disbelief. "Why don't you take the plane?"
Baku was an overnight trip from Tbilisi, not much more than the distance from Boston to Washington, but he had never taken the train. He had never been to Baku, in neighboring Azerbaijan, though he had lived for several years in Moscow and had spent some months working in Germany.
It occurred to me that, though he was thirty-four and had grown up in Tbilisi, he had perhaps never been to the Tbilisi railway station—or not recently, because he seemed shocked at how haunted and dirty it was. He made a face, shrugged at me in helpless pity, wished me luck, and hurried away when he saw the elderly train standing at the platform. |
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